A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE BY WOODROW WILSON, PH.D., LiTT.D., LL.D. IN FIVE VOLUMES VOL. I. Swarming of tbe lEngltsb OF THE UNIVERSITY Of A -HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE BY WOODROW WILSON, PH.D., Lrrr.D., LL.D. PRESIDENT OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY ILLUSTRATED WITH PORTRAITS, MAPS PLANS, FACSIMILES, RARE PRINTS CONTEMPORARY VIEWS, ETC. IN FIVE VOLUMES VOL. I. NEW YORK AND LONDON HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS • M CM VI II ^ Copyright, 1901, 1902, by WOODROW WILSON. Copyright, 1901, 1902, by HARPER & BROTHERS. All rights reserved. TO E. A. W. IN LOVING ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF GENTLE BENEFITS WHICH CAN NEITHER BE MEASURED NOR REPAID 210909 CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. BEFORE THE ENGLISH CAME .......... i II. I?HE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH,— • THE VIRGINIA COMPANY ........... 34 Y*NEW NETHERLAND AND NEW PLYMOUTH ..... 69 v. THE MASSACHUSETTS COMPANY ........ 100 • THE PROVINCE OF MARYLAND ......... 126 \THE FrPAvJSTOM OR THE CIVIL WARS AND THE COMMONWEALTH ... 170 THE RESTORATION ............. 207 NEW JERSEY AND CAROLINA .......... 238 PENNSYLVANIA ............... 283 THE REVOLUTION ...... ,,.,.... 328 NOTES ON ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE WOODROW WILSON (photogravure) Frontispiece FACSIMILE OF ANNOTATIONS IN THE HANDWRITING OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. — From Harrisse's Notes on Columbus, opposite p. 84, after a copy of Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly's Imago Mundi, printed about 1490, and preserved in the Biblioteca Colombina, at Seville, Spain. The annota tions shown appear on the margin of p. 18 of that copy . . 3 MARCO POLO. — Adapted from an engraving in Ruge's Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, p. 53, which was taken from an old portrait in the possession of Monsignor Badia, of Rome. The oldest attempt to give a portrait of him appeared in the first printed edition of his travels, issued at Nuremberg in 1477. Col. Henry Yule says, in his Book of Ser Marco Polo, vol. i., p. cii., that " there is no portrait . . . with any claim to authenticity." 5 TOSCANELLI MAP. — Facsimile of a conjectural restoration of a supposed map of Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, sent by him to Columbus in 1474, and by which, some claim, Columbus sailed on his first voyage across the Atlantic. This view has been recently controverted in a work by Henri Vignaud. Reproduced from Winsor's America, vol. ii., p. 103. A larger map — a newer interpretation — is given by Gustavo Uzielli in his ponderous volume on the life and times of Toscanelli, written in Italian and published under the auspices of the Minister of Public Instruction of Rome in 1894 .... 6 NINE LINES FROM THE " COSMOGRAPHLE INTRODUCTIO," IN WHICH THE NAME AMERICA FIRST OCCURS.— This work was compiled by Martin Waltzemiiller or Waldseemiiller, ix NOTES ON ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE a native of Freiburg, whose name is also found as Hylacomy- lus, its grecized form. The first part of his treatise is an in troduction to cosmography, while the second part gives the four navigations of Americus Vespucius. Several editions, differing typographically, were issued at St. Die, in Lorraine, in 1507. The facsimile is from one of these editions in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building) 7 PORTRAIT AND AUTOGRAPH OF SIR JOHN HAWKINS.— From a drawing adapted after a bas-relief ivory bust ; see the fron tispiece to Hawkins' Voyages, edited by Clements R. Mark- ham for the Hakluyt Society in 1878 9 PORTRAIT AND AUTOGRAPH OF SIR FRANCIS DRAKE.— From a drawing adapted after a copper-plate engraving in Holland's Herwologia Anglica, p. 106 10 BUFFALO OR " CROOK-BACKED " ox.— From Thevet's Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique (Antwerp, 1558), verso of folio 144. Reproduced from a copy of this work in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building). It is perhaps the earliest appearance of an engraving of the buffalo ... n PORTRAIT AND AUTOGRAPH OF JUAN PONCE DE LEON.— The portrait is drawn after an engraving in a volume of Herrera's Historia General, edition of 1728 12 AUTOGRAPH OF PA'NFILO DE NARVAEZ.— Copied after a fac simile in Buckingham Smith's Cabe$a de Vaca, 1871 ... 13 HERNANDO DE SOTO. — Redrawn from an old print 15 AUTOGRAPH OF FRANCISCO VASQUEZ DE CORONADO . . 16 RUINS OF RIZONA CLIFF-DWELLINGS.— From a recent photo graph. There are many illustrations of these unique struct ures in Nordenskiold's Cliff Dwellers, 1893 17 PORTRAIT AND AUTOGRAPH OF JACQUES CARTIER. — From a drawing adapted after the St. Malo portrait 18 OLD GATEWAY, ST. AUGUSTINE. — From a drawing by Harry Fenn 19 ST. AUGUSTINE, FLORIDA, 1742.— Redrawn from an old print . 20 X NOTES ON ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE PORTRAIT AND AUTOGRAPH OF SIR MARTIN FROBISHER. — From Henry Holland's Herwologia Anglica (London, 1620), between pp. 96 and 97 21 AUTOGRAPH OF HENRY VIII . 23 SPANISH GALLEON.— Redrawn from Fiske's Old Virginia and her Neighbours, vol. i., p. 39, who took it from La Graviere's Les manns du XVe et du XV T siecle 25 PORTRAIT AND AUTOGRAPH OF SIR HUMPHREY GILBERT. — From Holland's Plerwologia Anglica, p. 64 26 SIR HUMPHREY GILBERT'S MAP. — From the original map in his A Discovrse of a Discouerie for a New Passage to Cataia. Lon don, 1576. In the New York Public Library (Lenox Building) 27 PORTRAIT OF WALTER RALEGH. — From an engraving by Robinson, after a painting by Zucchero facing 28 MAP OF ROANOK^ ISLAND AND VICINITY. — Copied from an original drawing of John With, or White, preserved in the British Musuem 29 TITLE-PAGE OF SIR WALTER RALEGH'S " DISCOVERIE." — At least three varieties of this tract were issued in 1596. Facsimile from an original in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building) 31 PORTRAIT AND AUTOGRAPH OF JAMES I.— From a painting by C. Jonson, in the possession of W. J. Hay, at Duns, Eng land 35 THE SHIPS GOODSPEED, SARAH CONSTANT, AND DISCOVERY AT THE CAPES OF THE DELAWARE. — Redrawn from old prints 36 " SHIPS WERE RARE." — From a drawing adapted after an old print 37 " LIKE PILGRIMS, HERE AND THERE CROSSING THE WATERS." — From a drawing adapted after an old print . . 39 SEAL OF HIS MAJESTY'S COUNCIL OF VIRGINIA. — From Alex ander Brown's Genesis of the United States, vol. i., p. 57. It xi NOTES ON ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE is the seal which was used in the publications of the Virginia Company 40 TITLE-PAGE OF RICHARD HAKLUYT'S "DIVERS VOYAGES." From a copy of the excessively rare original book in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building), a British Museum du plicate. It is Hakluyt's first publication ; includes, among others, the voyages of Cabot, Zeno, Ribault, and Verazzano ; and was reprinted by the Hakluyt Society in 1850 .... 41 AUTOGRAPH OF RICHARD HAKLUYT 42 INDIAN VILLAGE OF SECOTAN. — Facsimile from an original in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building), which forms plate xx. in Part I. of the Great Voyages, published by Theodor De Bry in 1590. This part was issued in this year in Latin, German, French, and English. The English edition is one of the rarest books in the whole field of Americana 43 TITLE-PAGE OF CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH'S "TRUE RELATION." — From an original in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building). It is both the earliest printed work of Smith and the earliest published work relating to the colony at James town, Virginia . 47 CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH'S MAP OF VIRGINIA, 1612.— From an original of the first issue in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building) ; engraved by W. Hole. It was several times reissued, and was copied in many publications subse quently 49 TITLE-PAGE OF CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH'S " GENERALL His- TORIE."— From an original copy of the first issue in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building). This work was reis sued in 1625, 1626, 1627, 1631, and 1632 51 TITLE-PAGE OF LORD DELAWARE'S " RELATION."— From a copy of the original edition in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building). A facsimile edition of twenty copies was privately printed at New York in 1868 53 AUTOGRAPH OF SIR GEORGE YEARDLEY.— From a holograph letter of Yeardley, dated " James citty Jan. loth 1619 " [i.e. 1620], in the " Smyth of Nibley Papers," New York Public Library (Lenox Building) 55 xii NOTES ON ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE FACSIMILE OF LETTER OF SIR EDWIN SANDYS TO SIR GEORGE YEARDLEY.— Facsimile from the " Smyth of Nib- ley Papers " in the New York Public Library (Lenox Build ing). It is a contemporary transcript, probably in the hand writing of John Smyth 57 FIRST VIRGINIA ASSEMBLY— GOVERNOR YEARDLEY PRE SIDING. — From a painting by F. Luis Mora 59 LANDING OF NEGROES AT JAMESTOWN FROM A DUTCH MAN-OF-WAR, 1619. — From a painting by Howard Pyle . . 61 AUTOGRAPH OF SIR THOMAS DALE 62 JAMESTOWN IN 1622. — From an old print 63 GRAVE OF POWHATAN. — From a photograph by George S. Cook 65 ALL THAT IS LEFT OF JAMESTOWN. From a sketch by Harry Fenn 66 VIEW OF QUEBEC ABOUT 1732. — From Henry Popple's Map of the British Empire in America. London, 1733. Repro duced from an original in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building) 7<> TITLE-PAGE OF CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH'S " DESCRIPTION OF NEW ENGLAND." — From a copy of the original in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building). It is the first book published in which the name " New England " appears — a designation which originated with Smith 71 EARLIEST VIEW OF NEW AMSTERDAM. — This first engraved view of New Amsterdam appears on the upper half of p. 21 of Beschrijvinge van Virginia, Nieuio Nederlandt [etc], pub lished at Amsterdam by Joost Hartgers in 1651. It represents the present lower end of New York as it appeared about 1628 to 1632. Reproduced from an original in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building) 73 DEPARTURE OF THE PILGRIMS FROM DELFT HAVEN.— Re produced from an old Dutch painting in the possession of George Henry Boughton, the artist. See Harper's Weekly for March 9, 1895, for an account of it ... • • • 75 xiii NOTES ON ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE THE MAYFLOWER IN PLYMOUTH .HARBOR.— From a paint ing by W. L. Halsall in Pilgrim Hall, Plymouth, Mass . . 77 HOUSE IN PLYMOUTH, ENGLAND, WHERE THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS WERE ENTERTAINED. — From a photograph by H. F. W. Lyouns of Boston 79 PORTRAIT OF JOHN WINTHROP.— From a painting by Van Dyck, in the Massachusetts State House facing 80 AUTOGRAPH OF QUEEN ELIZABETH.— Much reduced in size . 81 ELDER BREWSTER'S CHAIR.— The original is preserved in Pil grim Hall, Plymouth, Mass 82 AUTOGRAPH OF JOHN ROBINSON.— Facsimile of an autograph found on the title-page of a copy of Edward Sandys's Rela tion of the State of Religion (London, 1605), formerly in the possession of Dr. Charles Deane, and sold at the sale of his library in 1898 83 A PILGRIM BABY'S CRADLE. — From the original in Pilgrim Hall, Plymouth, Mass 84 TITLE-PAGE OF THOMAS MORTON'S " NEW ENGLISH CA NAAN." — From a copy of the original of this facetious book in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building). It is also in the libraries of Harvard College, Massachusetts His torical Society, Yale University, New York Historical So ciety, Library of Congress, and in the collection of John Carter Brown (Brown University). The Prince Society reprinted it in 1883 87 HOLOGRAPH LETTER FROM MYLES STANDISH TO GOVERNOR BRADFORD. — From the original in the Emmet Collection, No. 4935, New York Public Library (Lenox Building) ... 88 PORTRAIT AND AUTOGRAPH OF EDWARD WINSLOW.— From the painting in Pilgrim Hall, Plymouth, Mass 90 TITLE-PAGE OF MOURT'S " RELATION."— From an original in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building). Other copies are at Harvard College, Boston Public Library, and Collection of John Carter Brown (Brown University). It " is a sort of Journal not intended for publication by those xiv NOTES ON ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE who had a chief hand in it, Bradford and Winslow, which, being sent to friends in London, was printed there, and is known as ' Mourt's Relation/ "— WlNSOR 91 TITLE-PAGE OF EDWARD WINSLOW'S " GOOD NEWES FROM NEW ENGLAND/'— From an original in the New York Pub lic Library (Lenox Building). Other copies of one or the other of the two issues which appeared in 1624 can be found in the Boston Public Library, Massachusetts Historical So ciety, John Carter Brown Collection (Brown University), and the British Museum. The book covers the history of Plymouth Colony from November, 1621, to September, 1623, and " is a story of the griefs and perils and escapes of the young settlement " 93 PAGE FROM BRADFORD'S " HISTORY OF PLIMOTH PLAN TATION/' SHOWING BRADFORD'S HANDWRITING.— The original manuscript, now deposited in the State Library of Massachusetts, is a folio volume measuring n/4 by 7% inches, and I YZ inches in thickness. It gives chiefly in the form of annals a history of Plymouth Colony to 1647, and was first printed at Boston, in 1856, in the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, fourth series, vol. iii., at which time a private edition of fifty copies was also issued for its editor, Charles Deane. A fine facsimile of the whole manuscript from which this page is reproduced was issued with an introduction by John A. Doyle, and published at London in 1896. The General Court of Massachusetts au thorized a verbatim reprint in 1898 94 AUTOGRAPH OF GOVERNOR WILLIAM BRADFORD .... 97 TITLE-PAGE OF THE ROYAL VERSION OR KING JAMES'S BIBLE. — There are two issues of the first edition of 1611, known respectively as the " He " and " She " Bibles, from the rendering of Ruth iii., 15. Reproduced from an original in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building) .... 101 PORTRAIT AND AUTOGRAPH OF JOHN CALVIN. — From an engraving by T. Woolnoth, believed to have been taken from a painting by Hans Holbein. The autograph is copied from an original in the New York Public Library (Lenox Build ing) 103 XV NOTES ON ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE PORTRAIT AND AUTOGRAPH OF JOHN ENDECOTT. — From the original painting in the possession of Hon. William C. Endicott, of Danvers, Mass 105 TITLE-PAGE OF FRANCIS HIGGINSON'S " NEW ENGLAND'S PLANTATION/' 1630. — From an original of the first edition in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building), which pos sesses also the second and third editions printed in the same year as the first. The narration covers the interval from July to September, 1629 107 MYLES STANDISH. — Redrawn from an old print 109 TITLE-PAGE OF THE " BAY PSALM BOOK." Facsimile of the first edition from the Lenox copy in New York Public Library. Altogether ten copies are known of this first book printed in English America, by Stephen Day, or Daye, at Cambridge, Mass. For the latest account of its history and seventeenth century editions, see The Literary Collector, vol. iii. (1901), 69-72 ill A VIRGINIA PLANTER WITH HIS ATTENDANTS IN HIS BOAT ON THE JAMES RIVER. — From a painting by F. C. Yohn . 113 DUTCH WEST INDIA COMPANY'S HOUSE, HAARLEM STREET, AMSTERDAM. — Drawn from an old print. It is located at 75 Haarlem Street, and is used as a home for aged men and women 115 ENGLISH GENTLEMAN, 1633; ENGLISH GENTLEWOMAN, 1631. — From Green's History of the English People .... 117 AUTOGRAPH OF KILIAN VAN RENSSELAER, PATROON . . 118 ORDER CREATING BOARD OF SELECTMEN, CHARLESTOWN, 1634. — From a heliotype in Winsor's Boston, vol. i., opposite p. 388 ; the original is among the Charlestown Records. It is dated " this loth of February, 1634 " 120 PORTRAIT AND AUTOGRAPH OF WILLIAM LAUD, ARCH BISHOP OF CANTERBURY.— From an old print, after the painting of Sir Anthony Vandyck 123 TITLE-PAGE OF HAMMOND'S " LEAH AND RACHEL."— Origi nal copies of this excessively rare book are in Harvard Col lege Library and the Carter Brown Collection of Providence. xvi NOTES ON ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE It was reprinted in Peter Force's Tracts, vol. iii., No. 14. Washington, 1844 127 PORTRAIT OF GEORGE CALVERT, FIRST LORD BALTIMORE. — From a painting in the State House at Annapolis . facing 128 PORTRAIT OF CECILIUS CALVERT, SECOND LORD BALTI MORE. — From a line engraving by Abraham Blotling (or Blooteling), in New York Public Library (Lenox Building), Emmet Collection, No. 1687 132 ARRIVAL OF WINTHROP'S COMPANY IN BOSTON HARBOR. — From the painting by William Formby Halsall, in the possession of Walter B. Ellis, Esq., of Boston, Mass. . . . 139 AUTOGRAPH OF THOMAS HOOKER 141 PORTRAIT AND AUTOGRAPH OF JOHN COTTON.— From the original painting owned by his descendant, Miss Adele G. Thayer, of Brookline, Mass 143 MlNOT HOUSE, DORCHESTER.— Erected about 1633 in that part of Dorchester called Neponset. Redrawn from Winsor's Bos ton, vol. i., p. 432 ... . 145 AUTOGRAPH OF WOUTER VAN TWILLER . 146 DUTCH FORT — " GOOD HOPE." — Redrawn from an old print . . J48 TITLE-PAGE OF THE CAMBRIDGE PLATFORM.— From an original in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building). It is the first edition of this famous book, and was printed by Samuel Green, the second printer of Cambridge, Mass. . . 151 UNCAS AND HIS SQUAW. THEIR MARKS.— From Smith and Watson's American Historical and Literary Curiosities, first series, plate xlix. In New York Public Library (Lenox Building) 153 MlANTONOMO. HIS MARK.— From Winsor's Boston, vol. i., P. 253 J54 ST. BOTOLPH'S CHURCH, BOSTON, LINCOLNSHIRE, ENG LAND. — From a photograph 156 xvii NOTES ON ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE PORTRAIT AND AUTOGRAPH OF SIR HENRY VANE.— From a line engraving by Houbraken, after the painting by Sir Peter Lely, in Birch's Heads. London, 1743. In New York Pub lic Library (Lenox Building) 157 ANNE HUTCHINSON PREACHING IN HER HOUSE IN BOSTON. — From a painting by Howard Pyle 158 OLD FORT AT SAYBROOK, 1639. — Redrawn from an old print . 160 HOOKER'S HOUSE AT HARTFORD. — Redrawn from an old print 161 PORTRAIT AND AUTOGRAPH OF REV. JOHN DAVENPORT. — From a painting in Alumni Hall, Yale University. Auto graph from an original in the " Winthrop-Davenport Pa pers," New York Public Library (Lenox Building) .... 162 HOUSE AT GUILFORD, 1639.— Built in 1639 for Rev. Henry White- field, one of the founders of Guilford, Conn., and the oldest house now standing in that State. See another view in Ed win Whitefield's Homes of our Forefathers. Boston, 1882 . 163 MAP OF NEW AMSTERDAM AND VICINITY, 1666. — Facsimile of the lower portion of the first published map of Hudson's River, which is found in a Dutch work entitled, Verdere Aenteyckeninge, printed at Middleburgh by Jacques Fierens in 1666. From the original in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building) 166 AUTOGRAPH OF SAMUEL BLOMAERT 168 STATUE OF SIR HENRY VANE. — From a photograph of the original statue by Frederick Macmormies, in the Boston Pub lic Library . 171 PORTRAIT AND AUTOGRAPH OF CHARLES I. — From an en graving after the painting by Sir Anthony Vandyck . . . 173 VIEW OF NEW AMSTERDAM IN 1656.— Drawn and adapted by Harry Fenn after a view on the Visscher map. It is known as the Augustine Herrman view, and was often reproduced in one form or other „ 175 WATER GATE, FOOT OF WALL STREET, NEW YORK, 1674. — From an old print . . . 0 176 NOTES ON ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE FIRST MEETING-HOUSE, 1634-1638. ROGER WlLLIAMS'S CHURCH. — From an old print. A question has recently arisen as to whether this old building was ever used by Roger Williams 177 AUTOGRAPH OF ROGER WILLIAMS. ......... 178 TITLE-PAGE OF ROGER WILLIAMS'S " KEY INTO THE LAN GUAGE OF AMERICA."— This is the earliest printed book of Roger Williams. Each chapter contains short vocabularies and dialogues in Indian and English, followed by observa tions, and ending with a poem. From an original in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building) 179 THE CANAL, BROAD STREET, NEW YORK, 1659.— Redrawn from an old print 180 FARRER'S MAP OF VIRGINIA, 1651.— From the original in New York Public Library (Lenox Building), in Edward Williams's Virgo Triumphans : or, Virginia richly and truly valued. London, 1650. The book, ascribed to Williams, is in sub stance the work of John Farrer. For an account of the dif ferent states of this map, see Winsor's America, vol. iii., p. 168 182 PORTRAIT AND AUTOGRAPH OF JOHN HAMPDEN.— From a line engraving by Houbraken in Birch's Heads. London, 1743. In New York Public Library (Lenox Building). Au tograph from Nugent's Memorials of Hampden. London, 1865 184 AUTOGRAPH OF SIR WILLIAM BERKELEY ...'.... 185 TITLE-PAGE OF NORTON'S " HEART OF NEW ENGLAND RENT/' — From a copy of the original edition in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building) 187 TITLE-PAGE OF JOHN COTTON'S " SPIRITUAL MILK FOR BOSTON BABES."— From the original American edition of 1656, in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building). It was first issued in London in 1646, a copy of which is in the British Museum „ 189 OLIVER CROMWELL'S LETTER TO JOHN COTTON.— From the original manuscript in the New York Public Library (Lenox xix NOTES ON ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Building), now reproduced in facsimile for the first time in its entirety. It is printed in the Bulletin of the New York Public Library, vol. iv. (1900), pp. 13 and 14, which see also for an account of its history 191 to 194 PORTRAIT AND AUTOGRAPH OF JOHN PYM.— From a line engraving by Houbraken in Birch's Heads. London, 1743. In the New York Public Library (Lenox Building). Au tograph from Thane's British Autography 196 PETER STUYVESANT'S BOWERY HOUSE.— Redrawn from Valentine's Manual for 1866, p. 579 197 TITLE-PAGE OF " NEW HAVEN'S SETTLING IN NEW ENG LAND." — From an original in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building). Only five or six copies are known to be in existence 199 ARRIVAL OF STUYVESANT AT NEW AMSTERDAM.— From a painting by Howard Pyle 201 PORTRAIT AND AUTOGRAPH OF PETER STUYVESANT.— From an engraving after the painting by Vandyck. Redrawn from an old print 203 OLD STATE HOUSE OF NEW AMSTERDAM.— Redrawn from an old print 204 ORIGINAL TOWN HOUSE, BOSTON, 1657-1711. BUILT BY THOMAS JOY. — From a print after the original pencil sketch by Thomas Joy 205 AUTOGRAPHS OF ROBERT SEDGWICK AND JOHN LEVER- ETT 208 TITLE-PAGE OF " A DECLARATION OF THE SAD AND GREAT PERSECUTION AND MARTYRDOM OF THE PEOPLE OF GOD, CALLED QUAKERS, IN NEW ENGLAND."— This protest of the Quakers, although not dated on the title, was printed in 1660. The title-page is printed in black and red lines. From an original in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building) 210 SEAL OF VIRGINIA AFTER THE RESTORATION.— From Will iam and Mary College Quarterly 211 XX NOTES ON ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE PORTRAIT OF JAMES BLAIR.— From the painting in William and Mary College facing 212 PORTRAIT AND AUTOGRAPH OF CHARLES II.— From a print after the painting by Sir Peter Lely 214 PORTRAIT OF EDWARD HYDE, EARL OF CLARENDON.— From a line engraving by M. Burg after the painting by Sir Peter Lely. In New York Public Library (Lenox Building), Em met Collection, No. 1694 223 THE WALL, WALL STREET, NEW YORK, 1660.— Redrawn from an old print 225 SIGNATURES OF THE COMMISSIONERS TO RETAKE NEW NETHERLAND 227 EARLY WINDMILL, NEW YORK.— Redrawn from an old print . 228 SLAB MARKING THE TOMB OF PETER STUYVESANT.— Re drawn from a photograph 230 FACSIMILE OF THE KING'S PROCLAMATION FOR THE ARREST OF WHALLEY AND GOFFE. — From the original broadside in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building) .... 235 AUTOGRAPH OF GEORGE CARTERET 239 AUTOGRAPH OF PHILIP CARTERET . 242 LOADING SHIPS IN ALBEMARLE SOUND. — From a painting by Howard Pyle 245 SIGNATURES OF CAROLINA PROPRIETORS 247 SEAL OF THE LORDS PROPRIETORS OF CAROLINA.— From a photograph from the original seal 249 MAP OF CAROLINA, 1687. — From the map by Robert Morden in Richard Blome's Present State of His Majesties Isles and Territories in America. London, 1687. In New York Pub lic Library (Lenox Building) 251 PORTRAIT OF THE EARL OF SHAFTESBURY.— From a line engraving by Houbraken, after the painting by Sir Peter Lety, in Birch's Heads. London, 1743. In New York Public Library (Lenox Building) 255 VOL. i.— 2 NOTES ON ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE ST. PETER'S CHURCH, KENT COUNTY, VIRGINIA.— Drawn from a photograph 257 TITLE-PAGE OF INCREASE MATHER'S " BRIEF HISTORY OF THE WARR WITH THE INDIANS IN NEW-ENGLAND." — From an original iri the New York Public Library (Lenox Building) 259 TITLE-PAGE OF MRS. APHRA BEHN'S " WIDDOW RANTER." — From the original first edition in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building) 260 PORTRAIT AND AUTOGRAPH OF LORD CULPEPER. — From a painting in the possession of the Virginia Historical So ciety 263 ON THE WAR-PATH. — From a painting by Howard Pyle . . 265 TITLE-PAGE OF JOHN ELIOT'S " ALGONQUIN NEW TESTA MENT."— This New Testament in the Natick dialect is the first printed in any language on the Western Continent. Be sides the English title-page shown here, it has another in Indian. About sixteen copies are known to be extant, and are described in Filling's Bibliography of the Algonquin Lan guages (Washington, 1891), pp. 132-139. Facsimile from an original in the New York Public Library (Lenox Collec tion) 268 NATHANIEL BACON AND HIS FOLLOWERS BURNING JAMES TOWN. — From a painting by Howard Pyle 270 TITLE-PAGE OF " STRANGE NEWS FROM VIRGINIA."— From an original in the New York Public Library (Lenox Build ing) 273 GOVERNOR BERKELEY CONDEMNING WILLIAM DRUMMOND TO DEATH. — From a painting by F. Luis Mora 275 A VIRGINIA VESTRY MEETING AFTER THE RESTORATION.— From a painting by F. Luis Mora 278 KING PHILIP'S MARK.— From Fiske's Beginnings of New Eng land (Boston, 1898), p. 240, which was taken from a manu script deed of land in Taunton, Mass 279 OLD HOUSE IN DOCK SQUARE, BOSTON.— From an old print . 280 xxii NOTES ON ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE NEW YORK CITY HALL AND DOCKS IN 1679.— Redrawn from a view in Bankers and Sluyier's Journal of a Voyage to New York. Brooklyn, 1867 284 NEW YORK ABOUT 1673. — Redrawn from the view on Hugo Allard's map. At least six later issues, by other map makers, are known to exist 286 THE STRAND, NEW YORK, 1679. — This view of the Strand (now Whitehall Street) is redrawn from an adaptation of Bankers and Sluyter. Cf. Shannon's Manual for 1869 ..... 287 A NEW YORK HOUSE IN 1679. — Redrawn from Valentine's Manual . . 6 . ' . 289 TITLE-PAGE OF " A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE PROVINCE OF CAROLINA." — From the original pamphlet in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building) of this first publica tion about Carolina < , . . . . 0 . . 291 ORIGINAL BROAD SEAL OF SOUTH CAROLINA.— Drawn from a photograpii of an original seal in the Virginia Historical Society 293 PORTRAIT AND AUTOGRAPH OF SIR EDMUND ANDROS.— From the frontispiece to vol. i. of The Andros Tracts, pub lished by the Prince Society. Boston, 1868. Autograph from an original in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building). Vide p. 297 295 DOCUMENT BEARING THE AUTOGRAPH OF SIR EDMUND ANDROS. — From the original manuscript in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building), Emmet Collection, No. 4913 297 PORTRAIT OF WILLIAM PENN, AT THE AGE OF TWENTY- TWO. — From a painting in the Historical Society of Penn sylvania facing 300 WILLIAM PENN'S FIRST RESIDENCE IN AMERICA (LETITIA COTTAGE). — Redrawn from an old print by Harry Fenn . . 301 SEAL AND SIGNATURES OF THE PENNSYLVANIA FRAME OF GOVERNMENT. — From Winsor's America, vol. iii., p. 484 302 xxiii NOTES ON ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE THE PENN ARMS.— From Perm's Genealogy 303 SEAL OF MASSACHUSETTS BAY PROVINCE.— From a title- page of the printed Records of Massachusetts Bay, edited by Dr. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff 304 MASSACHUSETTS COINAGE. — Photographed from original coins in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building) . . 305 PROVINCE HOUSE, RESIDENCE OF THE ROYAL GOVERNORS OF MASSACHUSETTS.— Redrawn from an old print . . . 307 FACSIMILE OF A SHERIFF'S RETURN EXECUTION OF A WITCH. — From the original document in Salem, Massachusetts . . 308 A PENNSYLVANIA CAVE-DWELLING IN 1683.— From a painting by Howard Pyle 309 PAGE OF TUNES FROM THE BAY PSALM BOOK. — From the unique copy of the original edition of Boston. 1698, in the Massachusetts Historical Society, in which the tunes first appeared 311 AT AN IROQUOIS COUNCIL FIRE. — From a painting by Fred eric Remington 314 MEDAL PRESENTED BY JAMES II. TO THE KING OF THE POTOMACKS. — Photographed from the original in the Vir ginia Historical Society 316 LETTER FROM GOVERNOR DONGAN TO GOVERNOR PENN.— From a lithograph facsimile in New York Public Library (Lenox Building), Emmet Collection, No. 10,546 .... 319 PORTRAIT AND AUTOGRAPH OF JAMES II.— From a photo graph of the original painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller . . . 321 PORTRAIT AND AUTOGRAPH OF WILLIAM III.— From an old print 323 TITLE-PAGE OF LAWSON'S " NEW VOYAGE TO CAROLINA." — From an original in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building). It was first issued as a part of Stevens's Collec tion of Voyages, vol. i., and separates on large paper also are extant. Both forms are represented in the above-mentioned library 325 xxiv NOTES ON ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE TITLE-PAGE OF " NEW-ENGLAND'S SPIRIT OF PERSECU- • TION TRANSMITTED TO PENNSYLVANIA."— One of the earliest issues of William Bradford's press in New York, after his removal from Philadelphia. From an original in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building), which is one of five known copies 33° INVENTORY SIGNED BY PAUL RICHARD AND JACOB LEIS- LER. — From the original document in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building) 332 TITLE-PAGE OF THE PENNSYLVANIA FRAME OF GOVERN MENT. — From Winsor's Narrative and Critical History of America, vol. iii., p. 484 ....<, 334 GOVERNOR SLOUGHTER SIGNING THE DEATH WARRANT OF LEISLER. — From a painting by Howard Pyle .... 336 MAP OF NEW YORK CITY IN 1695. — This map accompanied the publication of the Rev. John Miller's Description of New York, first printed at London in 1843. The map has often been reproduced since that year 338 PORTRAIT AND AUTOGRAPH OF SIR WILLIAM PHIPS.— Re drawn from an old print 342 PHIPS RECOVERING THE SUNKEN TREASURE.— From a paint ing by Howard Pyle 344 WILLIAM PENN'S RESIDENCE IN 1699.— Redrawn from an old print 346 AN INTERVIEW BETWEEN SlR EDMUND ANDROS AND JAMES BLAIR. — From a painting by Howard Pyle 347 THE FIRST CHURCH IN NEWARK, NEW JERSEY. — Redrawn from an old print 34? For the verification of the documents and the illustrative material here, and for the notes on their sources, we are in debted to Mr. Victor H. Paltsits, of the New York Public Library (Lenox Building), whose scholarly researches made possible so full a list. A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE CHAPTER I BEFORE THE ENGLISH CAME WHEN the history of English settlement in America begins, the breathless, eager stir of the Elizabethan age is over, and the sober, contentious seventeenth century has come, with its perplexed politics, its schis matic creeds, its scheming rivalries in trade. An age of discovery and bold adventure has given place to an age of commerce and organization. More than one hundred years have elapsed since the discovery of North America. Spain has lost her great place in the politics of Europe, and France and England are pressing forward to take it. While parts changed and the stage was reset, the century through, the great continent lay "a veiled and virgin shore," inflaming desires that could not be gratified, stirring dreams that only enticed brave men to their death, exciting to enterprise and adventure, but never to substantial or lasting achievement. The same mistake that had led to its discovery had prevented its profitable occupa tion. Columbus had set out to seek, not a new con- i A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE tinent, but old Cathay; and died believing that what he had found was in fact the eastern coasts of Asia. The explorers who followed him in the next century had persisted in; s^ekirig, as he had sought, not new, but old lands, rich with .ancient kingdoms and fabled stores of treasure/ lying l ready to the hand of conqueror and buccaneer. Such ancient kingdoms Cortez and Pizarro actually found in South America and upon the Isthmus ; and such every adventurer promised himself he should find just beyond the coasts of the northern continent also. Or else he should find something that would be quite as valuable, and possibly no less romantic, — a fountain of youth, untouched mines of precious ore, or waters floored with priceless pearls. The discovery of the New World had drawn Europe when she was most credulous into a realm of dreams. The Revival of Learning had come. Europe had read once more and with freshened eyes, as if for the first time, the frank sentences of the ancient classics, written when men looked heartily, fearlessly, artlessly about them, and her imagination had been quickened and enriched by what she read, her thoughts set free and rejuvenated. What she had seen also, as well as what she had read, had given her new life. For the Middle Ages were now passed, and she had herself become a new world. France had lost her feudal princes in the Hundred Years' War, and was at last a real kingdom under veritable kings, for Louis XT. had reigned. Eng land had been transformed by the Wars of the Roses from a feudal into a national monarchy, and the first Tudor was on the throne. Spain had cast out the Moor, and was united under Christian sovereigns. Former geographical relations, too, had disappeared. rtfcrta tnfam Hr^ircm mi <• ufolUiJ nun 3 ac immrfb »la c cora pa ipfc brcat iSuropaj die ma Dtcoijit" Cf frons ^noic, propccr regtqncm f^atba >ij man^ majnu ocfccnoe^ ;am I'nferiorcm feu Jlfrica? .'9 ^hoicDdcenoit a rrop'i tiDmbnrcm aft a leu. i rcoi .-:nunc Jlr^muocacurpa .ft Gpcne . vna fu? folfti •ooequanunceftfermo • r:ci in mcoio babi cation is cdtxcc fcpcecrione a mcri in rneoto ccr? ? habitabili i* x; c ofTcn o t: c am ftajcrupraDicciim eft iota in cpatate. BCD er nirabitiu Danccatc. F)a _ sariutoaauofencfcunc. '^^ ^T>Mr^ amen fcrpcnram qunbi pprM.lt« icrobii'tii.cubito^ logi laaq^ cc ungue^ pfeninc • o in igne'amore alter al iqui parents c Durn parac irimpiua iu ANNOTATIONS IN HANDWRITING OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS -A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE The old Europe had had its heart and centre in the Mediterranean; but the capture of Constantinople by the Turk, and the establishment of the hostile Turkish power upon all the eastern coasts of the Mediterranean, now shut her out from the habitual courses of her life by cutting off direct intercourse with the East. She was forced to seek new routes for her commerce, a dif ferent life for her nations, new objects of policy, other aims of ambition. Having felt the keen early airs of the Renaissance, her powers were heartened and stimulated for the task, and she faced it with a glad spontaneity and energy. She was strangely filled with hope and with a romantic ardor for adventure, ready to see and to test every new thing. It was naturally her first thought to find her way again, by new routes, to India and the great East. Por tuguese sailors, accordingly, sought and found their way around the southern capes of Africa; and Colum bus, more bold and more believing still, pushed straight forth into the unknown Atlantic, that dread and mys terious " Sea of Darkness " which had lain so silent all the centuries, keeping its secrets. He would make directly for the shores of Asia and the kingdom of the Tartars. In the new delight of giving rein to their imaginations men were ready to believe anything. They could be lieve even Marco Polo, whom they had hitherto been inclined to deem an impudent impostor. In the latter half of the thirteenth century, Polo, accompanying his father and uncle, had journeyed overland to the farthest kingdoms of Asia, when the great Tartar empire of Kublai Khan stretched from Europe to the Chinese Sea. He had seen throughout nearly twenty years the full 4 BEFORE THE ENGLISH CAME splendor of that stupendous realm, its rich provinces, its teeming and ancient cities, its abounding wealth and unexampled power. Some of its authority he had himself wielded; for he had been taken into the in timate counsels of the Great Khan, and had gone up MARCO POLO and down his coasts upon weighty errands of state. But the men of his day at home would not credit what he had to tell them of the boundless extent and resplen dent glory of lands which no one else among their neigh bors had ever seen, or ever heard named even, save by this Venetian adventurer. Who could say what truth there was, or what falsehood, in these tales of the ends 5 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE A CONJECTURAL RESTORATION OF TOSCANELLl's MAP of Asia and of a great sea lying beyond? Polo's story slumbered, accordingly, in curious manuscripts, or kept covert with the learned, until revived and brought to day again by the congenial air and the enticing cre dulity of the fifteenth century. In the view of that hope ful age nothing was impossible. These things arid many more Columbus credited and pondered, as he pored upon crude and curious maps, sketched out of travellers' tales and astronomers' reckonings; and it was the very Cathay of Marco Polo he put across the new ocean to find. The success of Columbus solved the mystery of the Atlantic, but it did little to instruct Europe, or even to guide her fancy, concerning the real nature of the lands he had found. No one dreamed that they were the coasts of a new world. Who could believe the globe big enough to have held through all the ages a whole con- 6 BEFORE THE ENGLISH CAME tinent of which Christendom had never heard, nor even so much as had poetic vision, — unless, perchance, this were the fabled Atlantis? Slowly, very slowly, ex ploration brought the facts to light ; but even then men were loath to receive the truth. When Vespucius brought home authentic charts of new coasts in the south west, thrust far out into the Atlantic, so that even mari ners who stra}^ed from their course to the Cape under stress of storms from out the east might hit upon them, Nuncvero & hc^partcs fimtlatius luflrata?/ Si alia quarta pars per America Vefpurium( vt in fe* quentibus audietur)muentaefbquanon video cur Amc* qtiis iure vetet ab Americo inuenrore fagacis ingc rico nij viro Amerigen quafi Amend terram/fiue Amc ticam dicendamtcum &T Europa &C Afia a mulieri* bus fu a forma fine nomina,Eius fitu &C gentis mo* *es ex bis binis Amend naujgationibus qu£ fequS mr liquide intelligi datur* PASSAGE IN "COSMOGRAPHI/E IN TRODUCTIO " IN WHICH THE NAME AMERICA FIRST OCCURS there was nothing for it but to deem this indeed a New World. No such Asian coasts had ever been heard of in that quarter of the globe. This southern world must, no doubt, lie between Africa and the kingdoms of China. But the northern continent had been found just where the Asian coasts were said to lie. It was passing hard to conceive it a mere wilderness, without civiliza tion or any old order of settled life. Had Polo, after all, been so deep a liar? Men would not so cheat their im aginations and balk their hopes of adventure. Un able to shake off their first infatuation, they went wist fully on, searching for kingdoms, for wonders, for some 7 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE native perfection, or else some store of accumulated bounty, until at last fancy was wholly baffled and re buked by utmost discipline of total and disastrous fail ure. Not until a century had been wasted were con fident adventurers sobered : the century of the Reforma tion and the Elizabethan literature. Then at last they accepted the task of winning America for what it was : a task of first settlement in a wilderness, — hard, un- romantic, prodigious, — practicable only by strong-willed labor and dogged perseverance to the end. While North America waited, South America prodi gally afforded the spirit of the age what it craved. There men actually found what they had deemed Asia to con tain. Here was, in fact, treasure-trove. The sea filk 1 with mighty Spanish armaments, commanded by m^ ters of conquest like Cortex; and the quaint and clois tered civilization of the New World trembled and fell to pieces under the rude blows of the Spanish soldiers. Then the sea filled again, this time with galleons deep- laden with the rich spoils of the romantic adventure. Whereupon daring English seamen like Hawkins and Drake turned buccaneers ; and scant thought was given any longer to the forested wilds of North America. Eng land and Spain faced each other on the seas. A few protestant sailors from the stout-hearted Devonshire ports undertook to make proud Spain smart for the in iquities wrought upon Englishmen by the Inquisition, while they lined their pockets, the while, out of Spanish bottoms. By the time the great Armada came, Eng land had found her sea-legs. Spain recognized in the smartly handled craft which beat her clumsy galleons up the Channel the power that would some day drive her from the seas. Her hopes went to pieces with that BEFORE THE ENGLISH CAME proud fleet, before English skill and prowess and piti less sea-weather. It had been a century of preparation, a century of vast schemes but half accomplished, of dar ing but not steadfast enterprise, of sudden sallies of audacious policy, but not of cautious plans or prudent forecasts. The New World in the north still waited to be used. And yet much had in fact been accomplished towards the future successful occupation of North America. Some part of the real character of the new continent stood VOL. I. — 3 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE sufficiently revealed. Early in the century Balboa had crossed the Isthmus and " Stared at the Pacific — and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise — Silent upon a peak in Darien." SIR FRANCIS DRAKE Magellan had found his way to the south, round about the coasts of South America, into the new ocean; and before the middle of the century Spanish vessels had beat their adventurous way along almost the entire Pacific length of both continents. By the time Drake set out on his famous first voyage round the world in 1577, the Spaniards had already established a trade 10 BEFORE THE ENGLISH CAME route across the Pacific to India and the Spice Isl ands. Their discoveries became very slowly known to the rest of the world ; they had no mind ta advertise what they found, and so invite rivalry. Each nation that coveted the new lands was left to find out for itself how they lay, with what coasts, upon what seas. It did at "CROOK-BACKED" ox last become generally known, however, that America was no part of Asia, but itself a separate continent, backed by an ocean greater even than the Atlantic. What was still hidden was the enormous extent of the New World. It had been found narrow enough from ocean to ocean at the Isthmus ; and the voyagers along its farther coasts had not been expert to mark the real spread and trend of its outlines. They imagined it of ii -A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE no great bulk. Throughout the century every explor er who sought to penetrate its interior from the Atlantic PONCE DE LEON along any considerable watercourse confidently hoped to find, near the sources of the stream, similar passage down the western slopes of the continent to the great sea at the west. Adventurer after adventurer, moreover, 12 BEFORE THE ENGLISH CAME pushed northward among the ice to find a northwest passage whereby to enter the Pacific. All such mistakes only served to make the real char acter of the northern continent the more evident. Every discovery contributed to sober discoverers. That the interior was one vast wilderness, grown thick with tangled forests, blocked by mountains which stood old and untouched, or else stretching wide " through mighty plains and sandy heaths, smooth and wearisome, and bare of wood/' with only "crook-backed oxen" for in habitants, the Spaniards had abundantly discovered by man}^ a costly adventure. In 1513, the year of Balboa's great discovery, and again in 1521, the gallant Ponce de Leon led an expedition into the beautiful peninsula which he named Florida, in search of a fabled spring whose waters, of "sweet savour and reflaire," it was said, "as it were of divers manner of spicery/' would impart immortal youth to those who drank of them. But the wilderness baffled him, and he lost both his hope and his life in the enterprise. In 1528 Panfilo de Narvaez sought to take the land by storm, in true Span ish fashion, landing a force of three hundred men at Apalache Bay, with horses and trap pings and stores, to march in quest of kingdoms and treas ures. And march they did, thrusting their way through the for ests and SWampS very SIGNATURE OF PANFILO DE NARVAEZ 13 " A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE manfully towards the vast unknown interior of the con tinent. Their ships, meanwhile, they sent away, to bring- still others to the enterprise, but with plans of rendez vous so vague and ill-conceived that they never beheld them again. After three fruitless months spent with keen suffering of want and disappointment in the wild forests, where there was neither kingdom nor treasure, they found themselves thrown back upon the coast again, dismayed, and in search of their craft. Finding that they must help themselves, they built such boats as they could, and tried to pick their way by sea to the westward. Caught in a rush of waters at the mouth of the Mississippi, two of their five boats were overwhelmed, and all who were in them were lost. The rest drifted on till cast ashore far to the west. Four men, and four only, of all the company survived to tell the story to the world. After a marvellous and pitiful pilgrimage of almost two thousand miles, full of every perilous and strange adventure, they actually reached the Spanish settlements on the Pacific, eight years after that gallant landing at Apalache. In 1539 Hernando de Soto repeated the folly. He brought to the Bay of Espiritii Santo nine vessels, with near six hundred men and more than two hundred horses. Leaving a small part of his force with the fleet, he set out with a great force for the interior of the continent. It was childish folly; but it was gallantly done, with all the audacity and hardness of purpose that distinguish ed Spanish conquest in that day. With contempt of danger, meting out bitter scorn and cruelty to every human foe, and facing even pitiless nature itself with out blanching or turning back, proud and stubborn to the last through every tormenting trial of the desper- 14 BEFORE THE ENGLISH CAME HERNANDO DE SOTO ate march, they forced their way onward to the great waters of the Mississippi. From the mouth of that river, in boats of their own construction, some three hundred survivors reached Spanish posts on the Gulf. 15 - A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE But without their leader. De Soto had sickened and died as they beat up and down the wilderness which lay along the great stream of the Mississippi, whose in land courses he had discovered, and they had buried his body beneath its sluggivsh waters. Meanwhile a like ex- pedition was wasting its . . . .,, strength in the wilds which stretched back SIGNATURE OF CORONADO 11*0111 the FaClllC. In 1540 Coronado, Spanish Governor of New Galicia, had led an army of three hun dred Spaniards and eight hundred Indians northward from his Pacific province in search of seven fabled cities of " Cibola." These "cities" proved to be only humble pueblos such as those whose ruins still so curiously mark the river cliffs of Arizona and New Mexico. Having put out parties to explore the courses of the Colorado and the Rio Grande, only to find the stately canons of the one, at the west, and the spreading valley of the other, at the south, without the notable peoples and provinces he looked for, he himself pressed doggedly onward for weary hundreds of miles, eastward and northeastward, to the far Missouri, to find at last nothing but vast deserts, without a trace of population or any slightest promise of treasure. It was a hard lesson thoroughly learned, bit ten in by sufferings which corroded like deadly acids. By such means was the real nature of the North American continent painfully disclosed, each maritime nation acting for itself. Sparrsh, English, and French seamen beat, time and again, up and down its coasts, viewing harbors, trying inlets, tracing the coast lines, 16 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE JACQUES CARTIER carrying away rumors of the interior. The Spaniards explored 'and partially settled the coasts of the Gulf. In 1534- 35 Jacques Cartier penetrated the St. Lawrence, in the name of his French master, as far as the present site of Montreal; and in 1541 planted a rude fort upon 18 BEFORE THE EiNGLISH CAME the heights of Quebec. In 1562-64 settlements of French Huguenots were effected in Florida, only to be destroyed, with savage ruthlessness, by the Spaniards, who in 1565 in their turn established St. Augustine, from which the French found it impossible permanently to dislodge them. In the opening years of the seventeenth cen tury French colonies were planted on the St. Lawrence j. OLD GATEWAY, ST. AUGUSTINE at Montreal and Quebec, and in Acadia, in the region which was afterwards to be known as Nova Scotia. English settlements also were attempted. All signs com bined to indicate the coming in of a new age of organ ized enterprise, when, with one accord, the nations which coveted the virgin continent should cease to 'fly to India for gold, Ransack the ocean for Orient pearl, And search all corners of the new-found world For pleasant fruits and princely delicates/' 19 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE and should compete, instead, to build communities and erect states over sea, and so possess themselves of a vast treasure of their own making. In the great enterprise of discovery and exploration Spain had held the first place throughout a century; but for the task of colonization the parts were to be dif ferently cast. The century had witnessed many pro found changes in European politics. In the year 1519 Charles V., King of Spain, Archduke of Austria, King of Naples and Sicily, heir of the House of Burgundy, and therefore lord of the Netherlands, had become also Emperor of German}7, and had begun to threaten all Europe with his greatness. But the vast circle of his realm had not held together. It was not a single power, but naturally diverse and disintegrate, and had speedily fallen asunder. In 1568 began that determined revolt of the Netherlands which was eventually to sap ST. AUGUSTINE, FLORIDA, 1742 20 BEFORE THE ENGLISH CAME and destroy- the Spanish power. By scattering her force too ambitiously, and staking her supremacy on SIR MARTIN FROBISHER too many issues, Spain began steadily to lose the great advantage she had held upon the continent. For Eng land the end of Spain's power \vas marked by the de- 21 - A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE struction of the Armada, and the consequent dashing of all -the ambitious schemes that had been put aboard the imposing fleet at Lisbon. There had meanwhile been reckonings between England and France also. Henry VIII. and Francis I. had kept restlessly at work to adjust the balance of European power to their own liking and advantage. Wars, brief and inconclusive, but ceaseless, swept Europe in every direction ; and then radical changes set in, both national and international. In 1562 the great Huguenot civil wars broke out, to rage for more than twenty years; and France stained her annals with St. Bartholomew's day, 1572. In driv ing the Huguenots forth to England and America, she lost the flower of her industrial population. She thwart ed her European enemies, nevertheless, and solidly compacted her national power. The German countries all the century through were torn and distracted by the struggle of the Reformation, and remained self- absorbed, forming the parties and defining the pas sions which were to bring upon them the terrible Thirty Years' War of the next century. When the new century opened, France and England alone stood ready to compete for North America. And, for all France was as keen to seek her interest in the New World as in the Old, the signal advantage, as the event abundantly proved, was to lie with England in this new rivalry in the wilderness. The reason is now plain enough. England had obtained from the six teenth century just the training she needed for winning America in the seventeenth, while France had unfitted herself for the race by the new life she had learned. England had become a commercial nation, quickened in every seaport by a bold spirit of individual enterprise 22 UNIVERSITY OF BEFORE THE ENGLISH CAME that would dare an}^thing for a success. The Tudor monarchs had, it is true, established a political abso lutism; but they had, nevertheless, somehow deeply stirred individual initiative in their subjects in the pro cess. In France, meanwhile, individual initiative had been stamped out, and the authoritj^ of church and state consolidated, to command and control every un dertaking. France sent official fleets to America and established government posts; while England licensed trading companies, and left the colonists, who went to America in their own interest, to serve that interest by succeeding in their own way. The French colonies pined under careful official nursing; the English colo nies throve under "a wise and salutary neglect/' A churchly and official race could not win America. The task called for hard-headed business sense, patient, practical sagacity, and men free to follow their own in terest by their own means. The Reformation had performed a peculiar service for England. It had filled her, not with intense relig ious feeling, but with intense national feeling. It meant that England had thrown off all slavish political con nection with Rome, and was to be henceforth national in her church as well as in her politics. It meant, too, that she was to have less church than formerly. When Henry VIII. destroyed the monasteries and ap propriated their means and revenues, he secu larized the government SIGNATURE OF HENRY vnr. of England, and in part English society too, almost at a stroke. The wealth of the church went to make new men rich who had won the 23 .. . A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE favor of the crown, and a new nobility of wealth began to eclipse the old nobility of blood. Such a change met the spirit of the age half-way. The quickened curiosity and nimble thought of the Renaissance had no courteous care as to what it exposed or upset. The discovery of new lands, moreover, stimulated all sorts of trade and sea- traffic. A general movement to learn and acquire new things had begun among masses of comfortable peo ple who had never cared to disturb their minds before. The literature of the "spacious times of great Eliza beth" was the spontaneous speaking out, with unex ampled freedom of heart, with unmatched boldness of fanc}^ and amplitude of power, of the finer spirits of a nation excited by every new prospect of thought anc enterprise. Fortunately the Tudor monarchs were stingy how they helped their subjects with money, even to defend their wealth and commerce against the for eigner. Henry VIII. interested himself in improvec methods of ship-building; and when he had time to think of it he encouraged instruction in seamanship and navigation; but he built no navy. He even left the English coasts without adequate police, and suffered his subjects to defend themselves as best they might against the pirates who infested the seas not only, but came once and again to cut vessels out of port in Eng land's own waters. Many public ships, it is true, had been built before the Armada came, and fine craft they were ; but they were not enough. There was no real navy in the modern sense. The fleet which chased the Span iards up the Channel was a volunteer fleet. Merchants had learned to defend their own cargoes. They built fighting craft of their own to keep their coasts and har bors free of pirates, and to carry their goods over sea. 24 BEFORE THE ENGLISH CAME They sought their fortunes as they pleased abroad, the crown annoying them with no inquiry to embarrass their search for Spanish treasure ships, or their trade in pirated linens and silks. It was this self - helping race of Englishmen that SPANISH GALLEON matched their wits against French official schemes in America. We may see the stuff they were made of in the Devonshire seamen who first attempted the perma nent settlement of the new continent. For a time all that was most characteristic of adventurous and sea- loving England was centred in Devonshire. Devon shire lies in the midst of that group of counties in the VOL. I.— 4 or - A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE southwest of England in which Saxon mastery did least to destroy or drive out the old Celtic population. SIR HUMPHREY GILBERT There is, accordingly, a strong strain of Celtic blood among its people to this day; and the land suits with the strain. Its abrupt and broken headlands, its free 26 •A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE heaths and ancient growths of forests, its pure and genial air, freshened on either hand by the breath of the sea, its bold and sunny coasts, mark it a place made by nature to indulge that sense of mystery and that ardor of imagination with which the Celt has enriched the sober Saxon mind. Next it lay Somersetshire, with its sea outlet at sturdy Bristol port, where trade boasted itself free from feudal masters, pointing to the ruined castle on the hill, and whence the Cabots had sailed, so close upon the heels of Columbus. For itself Devonshire had the great harbor and roads of Plymouth, and innumerable fishing ports, where a whole race of venturesome and hardy fishermen were nurtured. All the great sea names of the Elizabethan age belong to it. Drake, Hawkins, Ralegh, and the Gilberts were all Devonshire men; and it was from Plymouth that the fleet went out which beat the great Armada on its way to shipwreck in the north. The men who first under took to colonize the New World for England were bred to adventure, both by books and by the sea air in which they lived. Sir Humphrey Gilbert and his half-brother, Walter Ralegh, were gentlemen, trained to books at Oxford, and men of fortune besides, who could put forth into the world to look into what they had read of. Their books were full of travellers' tales ; their neighbors were seamen who had met the Spaniard at close quarters on the high seas, and lightened him of his treasure. Wealth and adventure alike seemed to call them abroad into the new regions of the West. Ardently, and yet soberly too, with a steady business sagacity as well as with high, imaginative hope, they obtained license of the crown and led the way towards new ports and new homes in America. They did all with unstinted energy and de- 28 SIR WALTER RALEGH MAI' OF ROANOKE ISLAND AND VICINITY BROUGHT AWAY BY THE RALEGH COLONISTS -A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE votion, embarking their fortunes in the venture. In 1583 Sir Humphrey Gilbert himself went out to New foundland, and lost his life seeking a harbor to the south ward where to plant a colony. He had made his own quarters in the smallest vessel of his little fleet, and calmly "sat abaft with a book in his hand/' even when the violent sea and the unknown coast threatened most sharply, cheering his companions the while with the stout-hearted assurance, " We are as near heaven by sea as by land/' On Monday night, the 9th of Sep tember, about twelve o'clock, his lights went out and he found a haven he had not sought. The next year, 1584, Ralegh sent out two ships to take the southern course to America and find a coast suitable for settlement. They hit upon Roanoke Island. It was, their captains reported, an exceeding pleasant land, its people "most gentle, loving, and faithful, and such as live after the manner of the golden age/' Within the next three years, therefore, until the coming of the Armada called his attention imperatively off from the business, Ralegh made two distinct efforts to establish a permanent col ony on the island. But both attempts failed. The right temper and purpose had not come yet. The first colony contained men only, and these devoted them selves to exploration instead of to tillage and building. Ralegh and his agents alike were still dreaming of El Dorado. The second colony contained women and families; but they made small progress in learning to deal with the Indians, now no longer gentle and faith ful; and they continued to rely on England for sup plies, which did not come. When finally search was made for them they were not to be found. Their fate has remained a mystery to this day. 30 DISCOVERIE THE LARGE. -H AND BEVVTIFVL Hi L' Or G v :AN A, WITH ition ofthc Great and Gold* tanoafW.W-'A,/^ „/,,,,// pi • :-r/;f, :;Ci Coun* - ;. ad. in the yeare I 5 9 5* by Sir rVIviA »/ Kr,iglu3Capiaine of her aiiii hcrHigh- lT T .j uc Lieutenant gcftcrai! of tiic Co untie of Come wall. $mf>rinted at London by T\oliert It^bin k 5 P 6* TITLE-PAGE OF RALEGH'S "DISCOVERIE • A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE And so the century ended, with only a promise of what might some day be done. But, though the new continent still remained wild, strange, and inhospitable, the approaches to it at least were at length known. The Atlantic was cleared of its terrifying mystery, and the common sun shone everywhere upon it. Both the northern and the southern routes across it had become familiar to seafarers. The merchants of Southamp ton regularly sent ships upon the "commodious and gainful voyage to Brazil" so early as 1540; and New foundland had been a well-known fishing and trading post ever since 1504. In 1570 at least forty ships went annually from English ports to take part in the fisher ies there; and in 1578 no fewer than a hundred and fifty were sent from France alone. Hundreds of crews were to be found in St. John's Harbor in the season, drying their catch and sunning their nets. Europe could not have been sure of fish on Fridays otherwise. The ocean ways were well known; the coast of North America was partly charted; its forests wrere no longer deemed the frontier barriers of kingdoms; the romantic age of mere adventure was past; and the more commonplace and sober age which succeeded was beginning to ap preciate the unideal economic uses to which North America was to be put, if Europe was to use it at all. It only remained to find proper men and proper means for the purpose. Note on the Authorities. — The general history of the discovery, exploration, and early settlement of the coasts of North America, before the English came, may best be read in the various chapters of the first two volumes of Winsor's Narrative and Critical History of America (where full lists of authorities are given), in the two volumes of Mr. John Fiske's Discovery of America, in the first volume of Mr. J. A. Doyle's English Colonies in America, and in 32 BEFORE THE ENGLISH CAME the first volume of Bryant and Gay's excellent Popular History of the United States. Mr. Francis Parkman has given a charac teristically lucid, accurate, and engaging account of the French settlements in Florida and at the north in his Pioneers of France in the New World. Those who wish to read of the early voyages and explorations at first hand, in the contemporary accounts, will find almost every thing that they want in Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations (edited by Edmund Goldsmid. Edinburgh, 1 6 vols., 1885-1890), in the invaluable Publications of the Hakluyt Society, and in the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. CHAPTER II THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH I. THE VIRGINIA COMPANY IT was the end of the month of April, 1607, when three small vessels entered the lonely capes of the Chesa peake, bringing the little company who were to make the first permanent English settlement in America, at Jamestown, in Virginia. Elizabeth was dead. The masterful Tudor monarchs had passed from the stage, and James, the pedant king, was on the throne. The " Age of the Stuarts " had come, with its sinister policies and sure tokens of revolution. Men then living were to see Charles lie dead, upon the scaffold at Whitehall. After that would come Cromwell; and then the second Charles, "restored/' would go his giddy way through a demoralizing reign, and leave his sullen brother to face another revolution. It was to be an age of pro found constitutional change, deeply significant for all the English world; and the colonies in America, not withstanding their separate life and the breadth of the sea, were to feel all the deep stir of the fateful business. The revolution wrought at home might in crossing to them suffer a certain sea-change, but it would n'ot lose its use or its strong flavor of principle. The new settlers came in two small ships and a pinnace, 34 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH the Goodspeed, the Sarah Constant, and the Discovery, all of which belonged to the Muscovy Company, which usually sent its ships for trade much farther north, to Hudson's Bay and Davis Strait, or to bring cargoes from Greenland and the Cherry Islands. The little band of adventurers had gone aboard their craft at Blackwall, on the Thames, and had begun to drop down the river to put to sea on the next to the last day of De cember, 1606; but rough weather held them for weeks to- 35 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE gether in The Downs, and it was past the middle of Feb ruary, 1607, before they got finally away. Their course fetched a wide compass round about by the Great Ca naries and the West Indies in the south, and it was the end of April before they saw at last the strange coasts for which they were bound. It was a lonely age in which to be four months upon the great sea, for "ships were rare/' only "from time ••' THE GOODSPEED, SARAH CONSTANT, AND DISCOVERY AT THE CAPES OF THE DELAWARE to time, like pilgrims, here and there crossing the waters. You were sure to see no sail anywhere as you went. And the land to which they came was as lonely as the sea, except for the savages who lurked within its forests. The three little merchantmen came none the less boldly in at the capes, however; and the tired men on board thought the shores of the vast bay within very beautiful, with their "fair meadows and goodly tall trees/' and their "fresh waters running through the woods/'' better than any wine to men who for four months had drunk 36 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH *' SHIPS WERE RARE* from the stale casks on the ships. And yet the loneli ness of those spreading coasts, forested to the very water, was enough to daunt even brave men. They presently found a great " river on the south side, running into the main/' and they chose a place on its banks for their settlement which was quite forty miles above the mouth of its stately stream ; for they wished to be away from the open bay, where adventurous sea men of other nations, none too sure to be their friends, might at any time look in and find them. They named their river the James, and their settlement Jamestown, in honor of the king at home. Eighty years before there had been Spaniards upon that very spot. They had built houses there, and had planned to keep a last ing colony. There had been Spaniards in the West Indies these hundred years and more, — ever since the 37 . A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE days of Columbus himself; and in 1526 Vasquez de Ayllon had led a great colony out of Santo Domingo to this very place, no fewer than five hundred persons, men and women, with priests to care for their souls and to preach the gospel to the savages. But discord, fever, and death had speedily put an end to the vent ure. The place had soon been abandoned. Scarcely one hundred and fifty of the luckless settlers survived to reach Santo Domingo again; and when the English put ashore there, where a tongue of low and fertile land was thrust invitingly into the stream, no trace remained to tell the tragic story. It was as still and bare and lonely a place as if no man else had ever looked upon it. There were but a few more than a hundred men put ashore now from the English ships to try their hands at making a colony, and not a woman among them to make a home. They had been sent out by a mercantile company in London, as if to start a trading post, and not a community set up for its own sake, though there could be little trade for many a long day in that wilder ness. Certain London merchants had united with cer tain west-country gentlemen and traders of Bristol, Exeter, and Plymouth in the formation of a joint-stock company for the purpose of setting up colonies in both "the north and south parts of Virginia"; and to this covnpany royal letters patent had been issued on the loth of April, 1606. The name "Virginia" had been given, in honor of Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, to the mainland which Ralegh's first explorers found beyond Roanoke. So far as Englishmen were concerned, the name covered the greater part of the Atlantic coast of the continent. The patentees of the new company 38 "LIKE PILGRIMS, HERE AND THERE CROSSING THE WATERS" VOL. i. — e A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE were to attempt both a northern and a southern settle ment, and, to serve their double purpose the better, were divided into two bodies. The London stockholders were to undertake the first colony, in some southern part of "Virginia/' between the thirty-fourth and the forty- first degrees of north latitude; while the incorporates who were of Somerset and Devon were to undertake a BOTH SIDES OF THE SEAL OF HIS MAJESTY'S COUNCIL OF VIRGINIA second colony, to be conducted to some point farther north, — though all wrere to remain under the govern ment of a single general council. There were men of capital importance and quick energy among the London incorporators ; and the en terprise they had taken in hand \vas not all novel. Several of them were members also of the East India Company, which had been formed seven 3^ears before, and of the " Russia or Muscovy Company/' whose trade in far-away seas was a thing established and familiar. 40 DIVERS voyages touching the di'icouerit of America, and the Hands adiacent vnto thc'-UmC; madc6rilof ail by our d tfterttsrdlf) t men and Brit on i ' , notes of aduertifemcnts for r;c ns nccc^Taric for Inch as iTtall hccreaftcr m A kc t he 1 ike attempt, mappts annciceu l|f ct ftiitfo irfianu matter, Imprinted -at Lon- don for Thomas Woodcocke, cfacllingin panics Umn at the %nc of the blackc bcar-c. TITLE-PAGE OF HAKLUYT'S DIVERS VOYAGES • A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE They were most of them men who had heard all there was to be told or read of the voyages and adventures by which America had become known in England; and some notable sailors were also of their number who had themselves seen the strange seas and unfamiliar coasts which others only read of. Richard Hakluyt, the genial and learned churchman, who loved every tale of daring and who knew more of the New RICHARD HAKLUYT World than any other man in the kingdom, was their associate in the new com pany. Captain Newport, to whom they intrusted the command of their little fleet, borrowed from the Mus covy Company, had already been twice to America: a clear-eyed man hardly turned of forty, and likely to understand what he saw. Bartholomew Gosnold, whom they commissioned captain of the Goodspeed, had him self discovered the short route to America by way of the Azores, and went now permanently to cast in his lot with the colonists. There were capacity and ex perience and audacity and steadfastness enough em barked in the service of the Virginia Company, it must have seemed, to make it sure of its success. And yet nobody very well understood what this new business of establishing colonies was to be like, for all that; and the colonists whom these capable London gentlemen sent over with Captain Newport wrere a sorry lot, it turned out, with whom to attempt an enterprise which should need for its execution every manly quality of courage and steadfastness and industry. Prosperous and steady men who were succeeding at home were not likely to be willing to go to America, of which they knew nothing except that it was full of savages, and that 42 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH INDIAN VILLAGE OF SECOTAN Ralegh's colonists had been lost there, never to be found again. Only men hopelessly out of work or out of sorts, and reckless men, young and fond of adventure, were v likely to think the prospect inviting, or the novel risk 43 " A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE worth taking, to better their fortunes, or to get the monotony out of their lives. It happened that England was full of idle men, be cause her life was changing. The very quickening and expansion of commerce and of adventure in trade and conquest which had changed all the age and the aspect of the world itself since the first crossing of the Atlantic had given England a new place in the geography of the planet, and was radically altering men's lives and occupations and ambitions there. New trades and in dustries were springing up, and the towns were reap ing the benefits of a diversified commerce. But the people of the rural districts had fallen upon evil days. Land, like everything else, had become a sort of corn- modi ty as trade gained its mastery. The old tenures, under which small holders had so long lived unmolested, were breaking up. The city merchants bought es tates for their pleasure, and wanted no tenants. The older landowners got rid of small farmers as fast as they could, in order to turn their lands into pasture for the sheep whose wool was so much in demand by the merchants and the manufacturers. They even en closed and appropriated for the same purpose commons which had time out of mind been free to all, and swept hamlets away to make the more room for their flocks. The demand for agricultural labor sadly slackened. " Your sheep, that were wont to be so meek and tame/' cried Sir Thomas More, in his anger and pity to see such things done, "are now become so great devourers and so wild that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves. They consume, devour, and destroy whole fields, houses, and cities." Town and country side alike filled with men out of work, who " prowled 44 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH about as idle beggars or continued as stark thieves till the gallows did eat them"; and unguarded wayfarers were robbed upon the highways by desperate men who could find no other way to obtain subsistence. James's craven eagerness for peace had put an end to the wars with which Elizabeth's day had resounded, and London was full of idle soldiers, mustered out of service. Young er sons and decayed and ruined gentlemen seemed to abound more than ever. It was men out of work or unfit for it who chose to go to America; and not men of the country-sides so \. much as discredited idlers and would-be adventurers of the towns. More than one-half of the company Cap tain Newport conducted to James River called them selves "gentlemen/' — were men, that is, of good blood enough, but no patrimony, no occupation, no steady habit, who were looking for adventure or some happy change of fortune in a new land, of which they knew nothing at all. Very few, indeed, of the rest were hus bandmen or carpenters or trained laborers of any sort. There was only one mason, only one blacksmith, in all the hundred and twenty. Only two were bricklayers, j only six carpenters; while thirty-five were gentlemen, and most knew not what to call themselves. The things it was most necessary to do when at last the landing had been made at Jamestown, — the planting of crops, the building of houses, the dull labor of felling trees and making a beginning in a wilderness, — were the very things which the men the Virginia Company had sent over knew least about, and had the least inclina tion to learn. They expected the company to send them supplies out of England, and gave little thought to what they were to do for themselves. When Cap- 45 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE tain Newport's ships put to sea again and left them, they were at their wits' ends to know how to maintain themselves. It would have gone desperately with them had there not been one or two men of masterful temper and gov erning talents among them. Captain Newport came again with supplies in the winter ; and still another ship followed him the next spring. And, besides supplies, the two ships brought a hundred and twenty new settlers between them. But among the new-comers there were shiftless "gentlemen" in the usual proportion; and there came with them a jeweller, two goldvsmiths, two refiners, and a perfumer, — as if there would be need of such people! Such additions to the settlement only made it so much the harder to develop or even maintain it; and the few men who could rule stood out like mas ters among the inefficient idlers of whom the incorpora- tors in London had thought to make pioneers. There was one among them, Captain John Smith, to whom, in large part at any rate, they owed their sal vation from utter helplessness and starvation. Cap tain Smith had a gift for narrative which his fellow- adventurers did not have, and has set his own achieve ments down in notable books whose direct and rugged ways of speech, downright temper of action, and air of hardihood bespeak the man himself. He was not yet thirty years of age when he began to play his part there in Virginia; he was exasperatingly sure of himself; older men found his pretensions wellnigh un bearable. But it was certain he had seen more of the world and of adventure than any other man of the company. He had known and had come to conclu sions with men of many races and of every kidney, as 46 T R V E R E iatbn of fuch occur rences and accidents of noateas ha:h hapn cci in Virginia fince the firll pUntir.^ohnAi Collony, which isn-jw rtfidcnt in the South part thcrcof^till ihclaftretornefrcm thence. Written fy C&ft&ir.c Smith oncofthef^tdCollony, to A ivwjhiftjull friend ot'his in England, -, • ,• xTtV^JQa v®(»] -t ' '•' • \f iJES *L ~--i|> J^^^ii^^^p—., »: o r^ D o r\^ ' foj:/^/? T:^, si;d nretobcdoldc at ih: Grey . hound in iCuics -Church v aid, b\ WAV. TITLE-PAGE OF CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH'S "TRUE RELATION A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE he had cast about the world, a soldier of fortune ; and he knew how they were to be governed, as he presently demonstrated. He rang like brass without, no doubt, but had a quality of gold within. He was a partisan of his own way of making a colonj^ and it may be col ored the narratives he wrote to be seen at home; but he was no sluggard at work, and knew how to take the burdens of tasks which no one else would attempt. He at least found ways of getting food from the Indians, and of making interest with their chiefs. Though he took authority when it was not given him, he made the lazy, " humoursome, and tuftaffety sparks " of the settle ment work, upon penalty of being set across the broad river to shift for themselves or starve ; prevented would- be deserters from running away with the boats; ex plored the neighboring coasts and river-courses, — for two years and a half played his part very capably and very manfully in keeping the struggling settlement alive, when the majority of his comrades would have been glad to abandon it. He compelled no man to do what he did not willingly do himself. "Gentle men/' under the spur of his example and command, learned to make a pleasant pastime of labor in the for est, — so that "thirty or forty of such voluntary gen tlemen/' as Master Anas Todkill said, "would do more in a day than one hundred of the rest that must be prest to it by compulsion/' — though doubtless "twenty good workmen would have been better than them all/' No doubt there were others who seconded Captain Smith in the maintenance of order and of hope, and who worked as he did to take some hold upon the wilderness for their principals at home; but upon him fell the chief burden of the task, because he could carry it and prevail. 48 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH When at last, in the autumn of 1609, he was obliged to take ship for England, dangerously wounded by an explosion of gunpowder, it looked as if the worst were over at Jamestown. The company at home had been very busy getting colonists, and had sent them over in goodly numbers. There were about five hundred 1 R ^r U ! i/$ > ^lfVl&4.f"^ " m^^^^M^^^^^i * A l4)',VAl\''^K''kl -ft ^''^^Vs^. -iv !>t» CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH'S MAP OF VIRGINIA, l6l2 persons at the settlement when Captain Smith left,— a few women among them, making it look at last as if the lonely place were to see homes established; and fifty or sixty simple houses had been put up. But numbers, it turned out, did not improve the living. Too many of the new-comers were " unruly gallants, packed thith er by their friends to escape ill destinies " at home; and those whom they joined at their landing still did not i.-4 49 • A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE know how to support themselves in the wilderness, or how to keep themselves safe against the fevers which lurked within the damp forests by the river. Added numbers made them a little more helpless than before; and the six months which immediately followed Cap tain Smith's departure brought upon them a desperate "starving time/' which no man who survived it ever forgot. There were few to work where every one was ill and in want. They tore their rude houses down for firewood before the winter was over; do what they could, only sixty of them lived to see the spring again, and a gleam as of madness plaj^ed in the eyes of those who survived those da}Ts of desolation. One came and cast his Bible into the fire, crying out that there was no God. It was resolved at last, when they could, to aban don the desolate and hopeless place, and the forlorn little band were actually on their way down the river, mean ing to seek food and shelter among the fishermen in Newfoundland, when Lord Delaware met them at its very mouth with fresh colonists and supplies sent by the company to their relief. The radical difficulty was, not that the company did not do its part to sustain the colony, but that it could get few colonists of the proper sort, and was trying to do an impossible thing. The settlers sent out had no hopes or prospects of their own, as the company man aged the business then. They were simply its servants, fed out of a common store, and settled upon land which belonged to no one but was used for all alike. No man would work well or with quick intelligence if he could not work at all for himself, but must always be working xfor the company. First-rate men would not consent to be the company's drudges. And what could the 50 (•^-••^•••^^^••^^^^••M^^^^^^Mfc ^*^Sfc THF. 1 , LL HISTOR1E 1 ^ ngland.diici the Summer ^;J2j3j \JlotfwAtaps and Defer, pi ions of all thole fflil Couniryes, their Commo<.{itic5,j>cople, $£/% Govcmment.Cutloincs.JncJ Religion vrt known e . Dnfint:i) ixro j-/xt lisene «-''N'c\\' Hngbnu 'rtnccdbvlD *nd TITLE-PAGE OF CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH'S " GENERALL HISTORIE" "A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE company get out of the wilderness in return for its out lay by the work of such men as it could induce to go to Virginia upon such terms? A few cargoes of timber, a few new varieties of medicinal herbs found in the for ests, could not make such expenditure worth while. Captain Newport, after his second vo3Tage out, had gone back to England with his hold full of glistening earth, which he supposed to contain gold; but it con tained nothing of the kind. It was only shining sand. Lord Delaware, though a little slow and stiff and fond of wearing fine apparel and going about attended by officers and halberd-bearers, which seemed fantastic enough there in the shadow of the untouched forests of that wilderness, was a wise and capable man, and no doubt saved the colony by coming out, that hope less spring of 1610, as Governor and Captain General for the company. But it needed a radically new policy to give real life to such an enterprise ; and that it did not get till Sir Thomas Dale came the next year (1611), af ter Lord Delaware had gone home stricken with a fever. The new policy it needed was one which should give it expansion and a natural vitality of its own. It was necessary that new towns should be built upon the river which should not be, like Jamestown, mere stations where men worked at tasks for the company, but ver itable communities in which men should be allowed to have land of their own, and should be given leave tc work for themselves as well as for the in corporators in London. For five years (1611-1616) Sir Thomas Dale and Sir Thomas Gates pushed this new policy forward ; and it was their new and better way of doing things that really made and established Virginia. "Henri- cus/' "Hampton," "New Bermuda/' and other new 52 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH THE RELATION OF the R-ii;ht Honourable the Lord 'Dc-La-lfarre, Lord Goner nour and Cinai>i(Lj Ccncrall of the Cslome 5 planted tn VlRGI NEA. t CONDON ted /'* ^ V-II-- . r T l\ r » v ijfiani ri.;ii „ for ''<^*7f.{j%vcl!in<7iii !"*»•»' /^» 1:1 { au*5 Churclv TITLE-PAGE OF LORD DELAWARE'S "RELATION" settlements like them, were added to Jamestown, each with its fort and its stockade, its military commander and discipline, and each with its group of virtually in dependent landowners, free to work for themselves. 53 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE Most of the colonists, it is true, were still held at James town to serve the company, and driven to their work, as little better than slaves, by their new task-masters. Gates and Dale came with authority to rule by martial law, without let or mercy, and colonists of the poorer sort got nothing but blows and rations for their bitter toil. Those who mutinied or ran away were put to death or to the torture, if need were, to keep the disci pline of toil and order which the company's treasurer and merchant adventurers were now steadfastly minded should be wrung from the colony. But the new plan tations showed the way to a new life. There were inde pendent settlers here and there upon the river, as well as men who were mere servants of the company. The better sort, even of the men whom the company had sent out, were given their patches of land and their time, — if it were only one month out of the twelve, — to do wrork for themselves, in order that the new plans might thrive. A strong root as of a little common wealth was planted at last. Dale and Gates both belonged to that capable race which had been bred under Elizabeth, willing to be soldiers or sailors by turns, if only they could be always in the thick of action. They had both been soldiers in the Low Countries against Spain, and, now that fighting flagged there, were both serving their turn at this in teresting business of setting up colonies. Dale was the more capable and masterful of the two : a terror to men who would not work or were slow to obey ; a leader after their own hearts for men who meant to do their tasks and succeed, — and his stay in Virginia was, fort unately, longer by three years than Gates's. He was but Gates's deputy so long as Gates was in Virginia 54 ^r* THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH (1611-1613); but he was master when Gates was gone, —prevailed even when Gates was there, — and it was his rough and soldierly energy which made the little group of "plantations" at least ready to last and to ex pand into a lusty piece of England over sea. When he had finished his five years' work, the colony, though small and primitive still, was yet strong and spirited enough to survive being despoiled by an ad venturer. For a year after Dale quit the colony it was left under the government of Captain George Yeardley, the commandant of one of the new set tlements. But in 1617 Samuel Argall came out to take his place, and proved himself no lover of the people he had come to govern, but a man chiefly bent upon serving his own fortunes. He was of gentle blood, but had too long followed the sea in those dis ordered times, as little better than a freebooter, to relish law or justice overmuch; and it was excellent proof that the colony had grown strong and able to take care of itself that it endured for full two years his tyrannous and selfish exactions (1617-1619), and yet was ready at the end of them to assume a sort of independence, under a new form of government which gave it the right to make its own laws. In 1619 Captain Yeardley, now become Sir George, returned out of England commissioned to take Argall's place and govern the plantations under a new and bet ter charter. He was to call together an assembly of representatives from the several plantations, and that VOL. I. — 6 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE assembly, sitting with the governor's council, was to have the full right to make laws for the colon}", subject always to the approval of the court of the compan3T sit ting in London. Here was a very radical change. The colony was to be no longer the mere mercantile venture of a trading company controlled by its stockholders. It was to be a little state, governed by its people. The fact was that a notable change had come over the com- pan}T at home. Until now it had been managed by men who were mere merchants, not statesmen : by men who cared very little about anything but the profits some time to be got out of the colony, — the sooner the better. Now men of another sort were in control ; the chief among them £>ir Edwin Sandys, a man who loved liberty, had a statesman's knowledge how it was to be set up and maintained, and wished to see the settlement thrive for its own sake, and the noble Earl of Southampton, whom Shakespeare loved. It was upon the initiative of these men that Sir George Yeardley had been sent out to give the colon}" self-government. Here, under the quiet forms of a mere administrative change in the management of the colony, was a veri table revolution wrought. Sir George brought with him a document, bearing date 13 November, 1618, which Virginians were always thenceforth to look back to as to their Great Charter of rights and liberties, — a docu ment which made of their colony a little commonwealth. It was drawn in the spirit of the men for whom Sandys spoke. Five years ago Sir Edwin had stood in his place in the Commons and maintained in the face of all present " that the origin of every monarchy lay in elec tion; that the people gave its consent to the king's au thority upon an express understanding that there were 56. f. -* r 4, > V H !r £ * Cp <^ r ; ? ^r-** f . I <: f1 f •— • a- ^K c*» 7 iT* ^ 0 T' y U •s p- a ff r>x ;f t Lr^r r^> ? Y ^. ,^ ' 8 ^ •-T ^> ? 1 f ^f >^>rvT' t> > >fc M ' t V I *^ » ? & t*s f t L ry T p 0 H^ / *«MP *K ? * cr^ Si ? f .1 i ? -^ s^ v§ J r J F

ordi; whither this prcfent ycafCj 1616, fi^ht lolttntArj Shift 4rf f one ttt r/i*lxfurtkcrtrj*ll. 1 M LONDON Printed by f/umfrey Lownts, for R*l>frt CUrkf^ and •are to bk* iould at his houle called the Lodge, in Chanccr/ lane, oucr a^ainLiLiu- colneslnne, 16 if. TITLE-PAGE OF JOHN SMITH'S "DESCRIPTION OF NEW ENGLAND VOL. i. — 7 - A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE men, resisted after a fashion that in the end set the whole power of rich Spain at naught. The war began in 1568 ; all Europe was stirred by it ; and when, forty-one years later, the Spaniard, quite out of breath, agreed to a truce, the world had changed. Holland had become a great sea-power; had driven the Portuguese from the Orient, taking their trade and their colonies ; was sink ing imperial fleets upon the very coasts of Spain her self, and sweeping Spanish treasure by the ship's cargo into her own coffers. She was beforehand even with England in making herself mistress of the seas, and had turned to this new task of taking possession of America with confidence and audacity. The Dutch combined conquest with trade, as Eng land did, and it was a Dutch East India Company of merchants which drove the Portuguese from their pos sessions in the East, as it was an English East India Company of merchants which afterwards conquered India for England. And when their East India Com pany had made itself powerful and famous by its con quests and adventures, the Dutch formed a West India Company also, to trade and take what it could upon the western coasts of Africa, upon both coasts of South America, and among the southern islands of the At lantic. It had, as Mr. Motley has said, a roving com mission to trade and fight and govern for twenty-four years; and it incidentally undertook to establish Dutch settlements on the Hudson and the Delaware. Henry Hudson, an English sailor in the service of the Dutch East India Company, had, in the year 1609, discovered the great river which was to bear his name, — the very year the baffled Spanish agreed to a truce with the re doubtable states of the Netherlands. He had also en- 72 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH tered the great bay and stream of the Delaware. The Dutch had promptly named the Hudson the "Great North River/' the Delaware the "South River/' and all the rich country which lay about and between them "New Netherland " ; meaning from the first to keep and occupy what their seamen had found. There had been a New Netherland Company, formed EARLIEST VIEW OF NEW AMSTERDAM in 1614, before there was a West India Company. Its charter had given it commercial control of all the coast country of America from . forty to forty - five degrees north latitude, a region which the Dutch described as lying "between New France [on the north] and Vir ginia/' This was at the very heart of the country which James of England had granted to the Virginia Company ; but the Dutch knew little of that, and would very likely have thought as little had they known more. It was the profitable fur trade with the Indians 73 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE of the Great North River that had first attracted them. Individual adventurers among them had built a small "fort" or trading post far up the river in the heart of the wilderness, as well as a little group of huts on the seaward point of Manhattan Island in the bay, and had been trafficking there with the willing natives for quite four years before the}7 formed their New Neth- erland Company. It was the New Netherland Company that grew into the greater West India Company, whose principal busi ness it was to be to wrest what it could from the Portuguese and the Spanish in the south, but which was also to keep an eye all the while on the North and South rivers, where the New Netherland Company had put its trading posts. It was 1623 before the great company found time amid its other business to carry out any S3rstematic plans of settlement in North Amer ica; but by 1625 there were already two hundred col onists on the lands they claimed: some up the great stream of the North River at the little post which they called Fort Orange, some within the South River at "Fort Nassau," some on Manhattan Island, a few on Long Island, — even a little group of families as far away as the "Fresh River," which the English were to call the Connecticut, It remained to be seen how they would fare scattered there in the wilderness; but there they were, a very hard people to discourage, by the time Virginia was fairly established in its own scattered set tlements on the James, and the rights of the great Vir ginia Company taken into the hands of the King, — and there they meant to stay. Meanwhile there had come out from Holland itself a band of exiled English settlers, to be their neighbors 74 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE and rivals at the north, and so put them between two growing English colonies,— not " between New France and Virginia/' as their first charter had said, but be tween New England ^nd Virginia. The new-comers were exchanging a temporary exile in Holland for a permanent exile in America, and effected their settle ment within the sheltering arm of Cape Cod. English men had begun to muster many thousands strong in Holland within a generation, and the two countries had been drawn very near to each other. Long before the war began which brought Spain and the Netherlands to a grapple, hundreds of English merchants had es tablished themselves in the Dutch seaports; and 3Toung Englishmen were beginning, even before dissenters were shut out from Oxford and Cambridge, to resort in influential numbers to the Dutch universities. When the Low Countries grappled with Spain, English vol unteers crowded into their armies. The troops Eliza beth sent over after 1585 found the Dutch ranks already full of their countrymen. English churchmen, too, for whom the policy of the Establishment proved too rigorous under the imperious Tudor queens, had learned to seek in Holland the freedom of worship denied them at home. At the same time refugees from the ravage and slaughter of Alva's armies poured across the sea from the lower Netherlands into England, and the two countries seemed to be exchanging populations. Trades men, weavers, mechanics, farmers, fled terror-stricken into the eastern and southern counties of England, often braving the sea in open boats when danger pressed most desperately. Their coveted skill and industty, 'which English statesmen knew how to value, their for eign birth and humble rank in life, wrhich seemed to 76 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH depress them below the level of political influence, gained for them an indulgence in theological error and sepa rate worship which was denied to Englishmen them selves, and presently the English towns in the east and south teemed with thousands of Dutch artisans, who were suffered to be Anabaptists, Lutherans, — what they would, so long as they taught England the industries and handicrafts which were to make her rich. The little company of Englishmen who, in 1620, ex- THE MAYFLOWER IN PLYMOUTH HARBOR changed Holland for America were not soldiers and traders like the men who had led and established the colony at Jamestown, but members, most of them, of a humble congregation of dissenters who had fled from the very districts of their native land in which foreign heretics were tolerated, to escape the tyrannical sur veillance of the Church, and who had found a refuge for a time in the great university town of Leyden. They came now to America because they did not wish their children to become Dutch or lose altogether their Eng- 77 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE lish speech and customs, and because they could look to have an even more untrammelled freedom upon the fruitful coasts of the New World than in the ancient states of the Netherlands, into whose life they found themselves thrust like those who must be always aliens. They were Protestants, and had left England because they could not brook the domination of her Church; and yet the reason for their exile was as much political as religious. Many men in England, some of them high in the counsels of the Church it self, held the same doctrines that they held, — the doc trines which Calvin had made the creed and funda mental basis of belief among all Protestants of the sterner sort, — and yet were not exiles, because they had not broken, as these men had, with the discipline and authority of the Church. England's Protestantism had a color and character of its own. Her " Reformation " had struck at the roots of nothing except the authority of the Pope at Rome. Her Church had alwa3Ts deemed itself national, had al ways held itself less subject than other churches to be ruled by papal delegates, or turned this way or that by the vicissitudes of continental politics and the policies of the papal state. She had broken with Rome at last, when the Reformation came, not because she was deep ly stirred in thought and conscience by the doubts ard the principles of belief which Luther had put afloat to the upsetting of Europe, so much as because her King, the wilful Henry, was vexed by the restraints put upon his marriages and divorces by the papal authority, and therefore chose to lead her still further along upon the road of independence to which her position and her pride inclined her, in religion no less than in politics. 78 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH HOUSE IN PLYMOUTH, ENGLAND, WHERE THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS WERE ENTERTAINED When the change had been made, stupendous as it looked amid the ruin of the monastic houses which the King had promptly despoiled, Englishmen found themselves very little more at liberty than before to choose forms of worship or of church government for themselves. The Church had become more than ever a part of the state. The King was its head and master, instead of the Pope. He did not insist very much upon matters of doctrine, being himself in no case to set an example in that kind ; but he did insist upon the authority of the Church in matters of government, — upon uniformity in worship and in discipline; because the discipline of the Church was now the discipline of the state, and part of his own sovereignty. He deemed schism a form of dis loyalty, though opinion, if it kept within discreet bounds, he would not too curiously look into. It was an easy 79 • A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE enough rule. Things might have gone very quietly and with a normal growth and liberalization, had not Mary, a fanatical Catholic, become Queen, and tried forthwith to force every one in the kingdom back into the Church of Rome; had not Elizabeth, in her turn, proved so absolute a martinet in every matter of obedi ence to the crown, — in matters which affected the Church no less than in matters which affected only her crown and government. Mary drove those who resisted her to the stake, or out of the kingdom. Elizabeth looked shrewdly into every movement that threatened the uni formity of worship, as changes of opinion inevitably did, and saw to it that all men were turned to adopt her preference. Most persons quietly submitted. Even men of strong convictions deemed it better to remain within the Church and purify its beliefs and practices without schism or revolution than to fling out of it, breaking both its unity and the peace of the country. Such men even drew together as a distinct party of "Puritans/' — men who wished the Church to be pure and to hold the essential doctrines of the great reformers who had given life and substance to protestantism, but who did not mean to lead it faster than it could go in the new ways, or to separate themselves from it and set up a Church and worship of their own, even though it were the excellent forms and beliefs of the church of Geneva. Others, however, were of a more exacting conscience, a more imperious and separate way of belief. It meant a great deal to them to have come into direct contact with the Word of God, to have thought upon its living sentences with the free, unbidden, individual right of interpreta tion of which great Luther had set the example. It 80 JOHN W1NTHROP THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH was King Henry himself who had authorized the pub lication of the Bible in English, and who had commanded that it be made accessible everywhere in the churches; and when once they had thought upon it for themselves and had found their thought, sober and chastened as it was, running in unsanctioned channels, some men pre ferred their own consciences and their own views of the truth to obedience, and refused to conform. They fol lowed the example of the Dutch, now to be found almost everywhere among them, and set up independent con gregations, — became "Separatists/' secretly and in de fiance of the crown. Elizabeth, bent upon being sovereign in all things, had grown harsher and harsher towards those who would not submit to authority in matters of belief and wor ship. Law upon law had been passed to prevent Eng lishmen from organizing any worship of their own wrhich the bishops did not sanction; and whatever was law Elizabeth saw to it should be executed. And then, when Elizabeth was gone, James of Scotland came to the throne and completed the discomfiture and despair of those who had clung to the Church through all that i.-6 8l A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE had gone before, in the hope of better times and more liberal ways of government. He had seemed a veritable Presbyterian so long as he was King of Scotland; but when he became King of England also he turned out to be of another opinion. "A Scottish presbytery/' he ex claimed, "agreeth as well with a monarchy as God with the devil/' He was head of the Church, he declared, not only be cause Henry had cast loose from Rome, but also because it was of divine ordinance and appoint ment that he should be. The bishops of the Church were his agents. " No bishop, no King/' he said; and men found that they must obey the King in mat ters of religion as never before. It was in the disheartening days of this new tyranny that the little company of " Separatists " fled from England into Holland who were afterwards to seek new shelter within Cape Cod in America. They had waited only until there should be peace between the Netherlands and Spain; and the truce had come at last in 1609 which gave them their freedom to go, following after scores of their country men who had gone before them. They had formed their separate association for worship in England three years before, in defiance of the law, meeting quietly in the old manor house at Scrooby, a little hamlet just within the borders of Nottinghamshire, on the great north road from London to Edinburgh. They were 82 ELDER BREWSTER'S CHAIR THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH humble folk, for the most part, of no social consequence, with only two or three scholars among them, — William Brewster, their elder, and John Robinson, their " teach er/' and one or two others bred at Cambridge, men of strong convictions and an exalt ed sense of independence and duty, who had been driven from the Church for nonconformity. But, humble though they were, they could not keep their ways of worship hid from prying eyes. The law was rigorously enforced against them, and they soon found that they could have no peace in England. They fled first to Amsterdam, but after about a year removed to Leyderi (1609). There they made comfort able enough homes for themselves, by dint of careful thrift and hard labor. Their new neighbors liked them and helped them, because they found them capable, honest, and diligent. But it was not like being in Eng land, after all. They felt themselves exiles all the while. Mr. Robinson, with his learning and his sweet eloquence, made friends and found congenial tasks at the univer sity, where his gifts were recognized and honored; and Mr. Brewster established himself as a teacher, " instruct ing students at the university, Danes and Germans, in the English language/' and even set up a printing- press, where books forbidden as heretical in England could be printed. Scholars were by breeding men of the world, and could adopt the manners and enjoy the companionships of a new country with a certain zest and relish. Mr. Brewster had known these strange places before. Close upon five-and-twenty years before, when the great war and tragic grapple with Spain was 83 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE at its heat, he had come into the Netherlands with Will iam Davison, the hard-headed Scottish Puritan whom Elizabeth was pleased to employ as her ambassador in that quarter. He counted statesmen and travellers and men about the sov ereign's person among his friends, and could be well enough at ease wherever duty or em ployment led him. But the majority of the little band were humble folk and found their lot hard. Even a bare living was difficult to eke out in a strange country, whose manners were as un familiar to, them as its language. They saw their children growing up, too, as the years went by, in a way that threatened to make them as Dutch as their neighbors, and forfeit their na tionality altogether ; and that was deeply distasteful to them. When the truce approached its end, therefore, and wrar was again at hand, a final argument of dis couragement was added, and they determined to try their fortunes in the New World, where Virginia had now become fairly established and seemed secure of its fut ure. They sent agents to London to speak with the mana gers of the Virginia Company, and obtain leave to set tle within their grant. Mr. Brewster could go to Sir Edwin Sandys as to a man who knew him and would befriend him willingly. He had lived at Scrooby manor A PILGRIM BABY'S CRADLE THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH house as agent of Sir Samuel Sandys, Sir Edwin's brother, and Sir Edwin knew his integrity and was of too liberal a temper to distrust him for his independency in matters of belief and worship. The exiles could count upon favor in that quarter, now that a statesman ruled in the counsels of the great company. They did not wish to go to Jamestown or to lose in any way their sep arate organization as a congregation by being merged with plantations already made; and for a little, while their negotiations wTith the Virginia Company dragged slowly, because Sir Edwin Sandys and its other leaders were of necessity called off to other things, they thought of entering into some arrangement with the Dutch West India Company to secure a separate allotment of land near the Great North River of New Netherland. But that plan fell through, and some of them at last set forth with a charter from the Virginia Company, — a charter conceived in the liberal spirit of the men who had sent Sir George Yeardley out to give Virginia a representa tive assembly and the full privileges of Englishmen. By it their leaders were authorized to associate with themselves "the gravest and discreetest" of their com panions and to make for themselves such " orders, ordi nances. and constitutions for the better ordering and directing of their business and servants " as they should deem best, provided only that they should ordain noth ing contrary to the laws of England. They were to be from, the first their own masters in making a wray to succeed. Not all could go. There was not money, there were not ships enough. Sir Edwin Sandys, with his generous public spirit in such matters, loaned them three hundred pounds without interest ; but they had no resources of their owrn, and the rest of the money they VOL. I.-8 - A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE needed they were obliged to borrow from unwilling mer chants who exacted the utmost usury, and made many delays about letting them have the little they consent ed to lend. It was the month of September, 1620, be fore those who could go, a hundred and two in all, got fairly upon their way, in a single small vessel, the May flower. Mr. Brewster went with them, as their leader, but Mr. Robinson stayed behind; for the greater num ber remained, to await a later opportunity, and wished to keep their pastor with them. Stress of weather kept the little Mayflower nine weeks on the Atlantic ; and when at last, in the bleak days of late November, they sighted land, it turned out to be Cape Cod, and not the Virginia coast at all. The master of the ship had let his reckonings go wrong, was many leagues north of the land-fall he had been instructed to make, by the Bay of Delaware, and found himself, as he closed with the coast he had blindly come upon, involved in shoals from which he did not very well know how safely to extricate himself. The Virginia Company had been divided into two bodies, as Mr. Brewster 's people knew very wrell, and the gentlemen in London from whom they had got their charter had no rights over this northern coast. It belonged now to the separate " Plymouth " branch of the company. The immigrants had half a mind to make for Hudson's River, after all. But the season was late and stormy, and the captain surly and unwilling, and they determined to land where they were and make the best of what they had hit upon. They took care first, however, to have some sort of government made ready for the landing. Their charter from the Virginia Company being no longer service able, and a few even of their little group of settlers being 86 NEW ENGLISH CANTAAl> NEW G A" N A A IS Containing an Abftract of New England^ The firft Booke fetting forth the original! ofthe Nativestlu Manners and Cuftomcs,togethcr with their tradablc Nature and Love towards the Englifh. The fecond Booke fetting forth the natural! Indowments oft Country , and what ftaple Commodities it yealdeth. The third Booke fetting forth , what people are planted thei ihcirprofpcrity , what remarkable accidents have happened finccthcr planting of it , together with their Tenants and pra^ifc ot cheir Church. IF/Y//•!, ty 3 ACOB FREDERICK S T A In ibt Teare 1637. TITLE-PAGE OF MORTON'S "NEW ENGLISH CANAAN A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE persons taken aboard in England who were not of their congregation, — and not certain, therefore, to submit without compulsion to be governed by their authority and discipline, — they judged it best to draw up an agree- O •*' FACSIMILE OF A LETTER FROM MYLES STANDISH TO GOVERNOR BRADFORD ment before going ashore, by which all should bind themselves to accept the authority of their leaders, until, at any rate, they should obtain a grant of lands and of power from the Plymouth Company, upon whose coasts they were thus unexpectedly to be set down. That done, they were ready to make their landing, and 88 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH see what sort of a home the new coast would afford them. The shores of the sea within Cape Cod by no means showed the soft summer aspect which Captain John Smith had found upon them in 1614, when he had cruised along these coasts. They had reminded him then of green Devonshire and the soft slopes of England. But now they were bleak and frosted and desolate. The pilgrims were not men to lose heart, however, and their leaders were of such quality as to relish difficulty and find a zest in daring. Besides Mr. Carver, who had been their agent in obtaining the Virginia charter, which they could not use, and whom they had chosen to be their governor, first under their Virginian grant and now again under the voluntary compact signed there in the ship's cabin, Captain Myles Standish was of their companj^, whose people had served England ever since Agincourt, and before, who had himself fought, for the love of it, against the Spaniard in the Low Countries, and who, when the fighting was over, had happened upon their little congregation at Leyden, and had chosen to cross with them to America because he liked both them and the enterprise. There was Ed ward Winslow, also, a young gentleman of Worcester shire, who had in like manner chanced to come upon them in his travels and had of like preference cast in his lot with them ; and William Bradford, of their own humble sort, who had gone with them into Holland when but a lad of twenty, had made himself a bit of a scholar while he plied his trade as a- silk-weaver, and was now, at thirty, counted already a tried man of counsel and of action. Several weeks elapsed before a suitable place was found for landing and erecting shelter; and even then 89 ' A HISTORV OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE it was only " the best they could find/' — the quiet har bor, within a little bay, upon which Captain Smith had written "Plymouth" on the map he had sketched as *~~J^^<*'&^^ EDWARD WINSLOW he passed that way, putting into bays and examining harbors with businesslike curiosity, six years before. January had come, and the first rigors of winter, before they got to work to put up shelter. Happily, the winter 90 A RELATION OR lournall of the beginning and proceedings of the Engliih Plantation (ctledat *Plimotb in N E vv E N G L A N D, by certaine Englifli Aduenturers both > Merchants and others. With their difficult pafljgarhcir fare ariuall, their ioyfull building of, and comfortable planting thcnv fclucs m the now well defended Townc Ot' N I. W P L I M O 1 H, AS ALSO A RELATION OF FOVRE fcuerali ciifcouerics fince made b fame of the fcmeEnglifh Planters clicrc r vct to Pv<: K \s OKiCKthfka6it teft King Mallafoyt : At*JJt ErZiw.'V, and arc to be ibid at Ills (hop at in Cprnluli aecrc the KoyaJl Exchange, TITLE-PAGE OF MOURT S "RELATION The earliest published book relating to Plymouth Colony 'A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE was mild, though icy cold, for all that. The strenuous work and cruel exposure of those first weeks, which wearily lengthened into months ere spring came, and the poor and insufficient food eked out from their scant supplies, brought upon them agues, fevers, scurvy, and all the other distempers that want and exposure bring, and they saw what the settlers at Jamestown had seen of the pitiless power of the wilderness. Before that dreadful season of suffering had passed full half their number were dead, Mr. Carver among the rest, and they had seen a time when there were but six or seven sound persons among them all to care for the scores who were stricken. But they were steadfast, as al ways. They elected Mr. Bradford governor in the stead of Mr. Carver, and went on as they could with their fight to live. They knew of no place to which to go back, and no one asked to go with the Mayflower when she set sail for England again in April. They worked against tremendous odds there on that barren coast; but they wrung a living from it almost from the first, and year by year patiently learned to succeed at the hard thing they had undertaken. It was a great burden to them that they had had to borrow- large sums of money from exacting London merchants to pay for the ship that was to take them out and for the stores she was to carry. They had been obliged to take the lenders into a sort of partnership, and" very soon found that they were expected to return a profit almost from the outset, working for a common store as the hapless colonists of the Virginia Company had worked till sheer failure brought them a change of system. It was many a long year before they were able to buy themselves out of that quandary and begin 92 N E WE S FROM NEVV-ENGLAND.V o ^ A true Relation of things very re markable at the Plantation of Ttfaoth in N B w - E N c L A N D.' ewng the Wondrous providence and good- nes of G o n,in ihcir prcicrv'ation and continuance, bthig dtlivitred from many 0pjMi:iNt Together with a Relation of fuch religious and ci vill Lawes and Cuftomes, a.s arc in praftik araongil the /A.if.m/, adjoyning to them at this day. As alib ' •»•';.//• C<-n>modtUts we there ttt.fo rjjfetl for tbe w*nfe of that And other titnt in the fad Country* ,\'rittcn l>y £. /f. wlia hath borne a part in the io/t iiaintd troubles, and there lined llr.ee their hrit Arrival!. LONDON Printed by A £>. fori^//// aie u> oc loidat their shops,- at dis'Bsble h\P.uJt Cimrch y*. ,\} ant- a: thi. ihice Gold- :rt Ljons in Coi|\-hill» r.cat the J*rf TITLE-PAGE OF EDWARD WINSLOW'S "GOOD NEWES " wLn -mrfA a::pra;<.\o us cnc*~tK/i ' •A. Cr~pe.rott.rSj e-n tefvcx* Atfow Crronx? /urtfits , x.nJr (e\Lljf Cut* -f-o-^is they So At m PAGE FROM BRADFORD'S "HISTORY OF PI.IMOTH PLANTATION," SHOWING BRADFORD'S HANDWRITING THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH at last a free life for themselves. Additional settlers came out to them in small companies, season by season ; but they were not always such persons as they wished for. They were, too many of them, young fellows of an irresponsible and unmanageable sort, "who little considered whither or about what they went." It was not until a full ten years had gone by that the little congregation were able to fulfil their long-cherished hope arid bring over from Leyden considerable numbers of their old-time comrades in exile; and before that time came Mr. Robinson, their beloved pastor, whom they had most desired, was dead. They were not a little troubled, and even endangered, moreover, by helpless or unmanageable neighbors: bands of Englishmen of one sort or another, — some mere adventurers, others sober and earnest but not fit for the grim work of making homes or winning a livelihood in a wilderness such as that was, — who came to attempt settlements, or trade with the Indians, on the great Bay of Massachusetts near by. Sometimes it was necessary in mere pity to succor these people; sometimes it was necessary very summarily to check them or drive them off, lest they should make irreparable mischief with the Indians. Despite every difficulty, nevertheless, Mr. Bradford's indomitable colonists made their foothold secure at Plymouth; worked themselves free from the London partnership; found how to get good crops, and what sorts of crops to get, out of the unwilling soil ; established fisheries upon the near-by coasts, and trading posts here and there among the more distant Indian tribes, — one as far away as Kennebec, in Maine. The " Council for New England/' which represented the new company estab- 95 A HISTORY OE THE AMERICAN PEOPLE lished in England to control and develop these northern coasts once included in the Virginia grants, was very glad to encourage these their unexpected colonists at Plymouth, and sent a liberal charter out to them by the very first ship that came from England after the return of the Mayfloicer ; and when they % were ready to ask for more privileges, — as, for example, for leave to set up a post on the Kennebec, — very promptly gave them what they asked for. By the time their old friends from Ley den came to them, in 1630, they had reason to feel secure enough in their new home, and had only their neighbors to fear, — only the past to sadden them. It was at first only unruly or shiftless English settlers who gave them cause for uneasiness ; but they had not been long at Plymouth before they were given reason to think about the Dutch also, as jealous neighbors and rivals who might cause them serious annoyance, if nothing worse. A very cordial treaty of alliance be tween England and Holland had been concluded when King James died, and his son, the first Charles, came to the throne, in 1625; and there was likely, for the present at least, to be peace and good will between the two peoples. But there was no telling how long it would last, and the Dutch were meanwhile growing very nu merous and strong on Hudson's River. The treaty with England had, indeed, seemed to give the Dutch West India Company fresh heart for their enterprise in New Netherland. They immediately despatched thither an active man as governor, and began to erect warehouses and batteries of good stone masonry at "Fort Amster dam" on Manhattan Island, where guns could com mand some portion of the great bay of the North River and the approaches to the great river itself very handily. 96 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH The scattered families at Fort Orange and on the South River, at Fort Nassau, were brought together for greater strength and security at Fort Amsterdam, and there were presently close upon three hundred settlers there, so busy with their labor and trading that before two years had gone by under the new governor (1628) they had sent home, in two ships alone, sixty-one thousand guilders' worth of timber from the forests, and of furs bought from the northern Indians. Mr. Bradford and his people at Plymouth set up a trading post some twenty miles to the southward on Buzzards Bay, but it turned out that the Dutch could beat them there; for it was chiefly on Long Island, which the Dutch con trolled, that the wampum was to be obtained which the Indians accepted as money, and the Plymouth traders were at a serious disadvantage without it. They were cut off from the lucrative fur trade of the North River, and were every way pushed very hard by the shrewd Dutch traders. The governors of the rival colonies exchanged very courteous letters, and the secretary of New Netherland was sent on a visit of ceremony and good will to Plym outh ; but even in this friendly correspondence there were prophetic hints of something less gentle and peace able. Bradford called Governor Minuit's attention to the fact that the Dutch were settled within the limits of grants made by the English crown to the Virginia Com pany, and that their right to be there might some day be called in question ; and Minuit replied, very spiritedly, "As the English claim authority under the King of England, so we derive ours from the States of Holland, '-7 97 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE and will defend it." No doubt, too, the secreta^ of the Dutch colony was sent upon his visit of courtesy as much to see how the English fared arid report upon the strength of the Ptymouth settlement as to carry messages of good feeling. It is from him that we learn what the pilgrim colony looked like in that early day, when it was but seven years old (1627) : how a broad street, it might be eight hundred feet long, ran up the hill straight from the landing place in the harbor, and was crossed midway by another street, with four cannon in the open place at the crossing, and the governor's house close by upon the upper corner; how the houses, all of good hewn plank, stood in their little gardens ranged at intervals along the streets, and stockaded against attack ; and how, crowning the hill, there stood a square building, large and very stoutly made, on whose top, as on a platform, there were six cannon placed, to command from their elevation the country round about and the harbor below, and within which was their place of meeting and of worship. They went always to church in military array, he said, their captain commanding, and laid their arms down close beside them while they worshipped and heard the sermon. They remembered their sojourn in Holland with much gratitude, and accorded the Dutch secretary a hearty welcome. But it was likely that New Amsterdam and New Plymouth would be keen rivals, nevertheless, and no love lost between them in the long run. Authorities on the history of New Netherland and New York in the seventeenth century. The first volume of John Romeyn Brodhead's History of the State of New York gives the history of the Dutch period in a narrative of unusual dignity, lucidity, and fulness. The second volume brings the narrative down to 1691, Edward B. O'Callaghan's History of New Netherland, in two THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH volumes, is a careful and detailed narrative of the Dutch period only. Mr. John Fiske, in his Dutch and Quaker Colonies, sketches the whole length of New Netherland and New York history in his well-known broad and lucid way, with a wealth of incidental il lustrative detail. William Smith's History of the Late Province of New York from its Discovery to 1762 is contained in the Col lections of the New York Historical Society. Bancroft and Hildreth both sketch the history of New York in tolerably full outline in their general histories of the country. The sources of New Netherland and New York history are to be found chiefly in E. B. O'Callaghan's Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland, 1638-1674, and in the same author's Documentary History of the State of New York ; in the fifteen volumes of E. B. O'Callaghan's and Berthold Fernow's Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York ; in the Memoirs of the Long Island Historical Society ; in the Publications of the Hakluyt Society ; in Sainsbury's Calendar of [English] State Papers, Colo- nial V.; in Stedman and Hutchinson's Library of American Litera ture; in the Appendix to Read's Henry Hudson; and in the Records of New Netherland from 1653 to 1674, edited by Berthold Fernow. Authorities on the history of New Plymouth in the seventeenth century. John Gorham Palfrey's History of New England (1492- 1774) and Compendious History of New England (1497-1765), the former in five and the latter in four volumes, are the standard general histories of the group of colonies of which Plymouth was the first. Mr. J. A. Doyle, in the second volume of his English Colonies in America, gives an excellent account of the Plymouth colony in the modern critical method. Mr. John Fiske sketches its history in his Beginnings of New England. Bancroft and Hildreth set it forth at some length in their histories. Mr. F. B. Dexter gives a brief critical sketch of it in the third volume of Win- sor's Narrative and Critical History of America. The original sources of the narrative are to be found, for the most part, in William Bradford's History of the Plymouth Plantation, always admirable for its accuracy and good temper, which brings the account down at first hand to 1647; in the Plymouth Colony Records; in the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society ; in Alexander Young's Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers and Chronicles of Massachusetts; and in Stedman and Hutchinson's Library of American Literature. For accounts of the general Puritan movement in England of which the Plymouth emigration formed a part, see the references following Section III. of this chapter. 99 III. THE MASSACHUSETTS COMPANY THE business of both Church and State had altered very ominously in England during the eventful years which brought James's reign to a close and gave Eng lishmen their first taste of Charles's quality. The air had filled with signs of revolution; and it was one of the most serious of these that the Puritans, who had once been merely champions of pure doctrine and a simplified worship wdthin the Church, had now become a political party, and were trying to put a curb upon the King in every matter. At. first they had thought that they might reform the Church, which they loyally loved, by the slow and peaceable ways of precept and example, — by preaching the new doctrines of Calvin, and by systematically simplifying the worship in their churches until they should have got the forms and no tions of Rome out of them altogether. Elizabeth taught them that that was impossible while she was queen. Her harsh measures hardened their temper, and made them a distinct and active party : first for concert with in the Church; now at last for concert also in matters of state, because the times had changed. James had come to the throne and grievously disap pointed them; and Charles, after him, had turned out to be not even a serious opponent of Rome itself. In 1618, while James wras yet king, the terrible Thirty Years' War had come, that mighty struggle between the Prot- 100 L Y Jp^*I •!^%lP?}| BIBLE, ppjp" ' ^^^^-ontcyninstlic()^"f*cftA- pfC§^S HM'^^r/iir - f IMPRINT El) ^ acLondo.) In- '/rr v^-*i;yjpv - | $ ^,'i-^r^um) *&»•• ^:;^rpi A &^-^. m -•' SsjB L I*/ ..S c^ ^^> s» «^^^C rJh^'W^UlEi, -*i,-^£'j- • ' £lil " ^^^^^^^>^^'*^|^:^A"^-^ C^'--i7,lVi Jwc- I-^jEsatijr-Tc^*^^ ^', .- v?.. L-: ^fc 'm_£!(jf) •> \~^ TITLE-PAGE OF FIRST EDITION OF KING JAMES'S BIBLE VOL. I. — 9 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE estant and the Roman Catholic states of the Continent, which threatened to tear away the very foundations of liberty and of national life, should the papacy pre vail; and yet Charles had married a Roman Catholic princess, and showed himself as ready to make bar gains wdth Roman Catholic as alliances with Protestant princes. Moreover, he was as indifferent to the politi cal rights of his subjects as he was to their Protestant opinions. When his Parliament, disapproving his pol icy, refused to vote him money, he levied taxes with out their consent, and seemed determined to break as he pleased every understanding of the constitution. The salvation of the Church and the salvation of the liberties of England he made to seem one and the same thing : for he wrould respect neither law nor opinion. And so the chief Puritan gentlemen of the kingdom* became politicians, and filled the House of Commons with men of their wray of thinking, grimly determined to make a single piece of work of the purification of the Church and the maintenance of liberty. Charles found no way to be rid of their protests except to do without a Parliament altogether; and to that at last he made up his mind. He dismissed the Parliament of 1629, resolved to have done with Parliaments. For eleven years he kept his resolve. No Parliament wasj summoned; money was raised without warrant of law; and the government wras conducted entirely as he willed. t , •„ . ; I | . It was in that way he brought a great revolution on &nd lost his head, for he was dealing with men who could not safely be defied. But for the moment he seemed master. The first shock of such events was enough to dismay men who were lovers of law and of right, who 102 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH had intended no revolution, who had meant to fight tyranny only by legal process and in behalf of priv ileges acknowledged time out of mind. Even stout- JOHN CALVIN hearted men lost hope for a little, and thought their cause undone in that dark year 1629, when they saw their leaders in the King's prisons, and the King master ful and hot against all who dared so much as protest. And so a new exodus began, not to Holland this time, 103 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE but direct to America, — an exodus not of separatists, of whom the law had already made outlaws, but of those sober Puritans who had remained in the Church, and had been its hope of reform. A company had been formed among, them for the purpose of attempting a settlement in America even ibefore the end of all Puritan hopes had seemed to come. Lands had been purchased from the Council for New England in March, 1628, and a party of settlers had been sent out that very summer under John Endecott, a blunt, passionate, wilful man, hard to deal with, but more efficient than any other the company could find, and more likely to succeed. He chose Salem, not far within the northern cape of the great Bay of Massa chusetts, as his place of settlement; and when a large body of new settlers were sent out to him the next summer he and his people were ready for them, with houses built and crops ripening. That same year, 1629, the company in England obtained a charter from the crown, and assumed a new importance and author ity as "The Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay in New England. " There could have been no better time to get recruits for a Puritan colony,— not mechanics merely, and such humble folk, or men out of employment, but people of substance also, who would give themselves and their fortunes to the enterprise, in the hope that they might at any rate find freedom of conscience, and establish a free state in America. Most of those who entered the company meant also to become its colonists. The company itself, therefore, was transferred over sea, its governor and council themselves taking ship to the colony they were to govern. There was not to be a 104 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH " Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay " set up in London to rule and dispose of a distant colony, as the Virginia Company had ruled Virginia. It was to have its seat where it had its possessions. It kept still a group of its incorporators in London, organized for the management of its financial interests; and the 105 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE law officers of the crown no doubt for a time deemed these the council of the company itself. But they learned presently that the}7 were not. The real rulers of the new colony had no mind to conduct their business in London in open courts under the eye of the King and draw all the talk of the town upon them, as the Virginia Company had done, to its undoing. There was nothing in their charter which prescribed where the councils of the company should meet. The}7 made bold, there fore, to take their charter and all the business done under it with them to America. More than seventeen ships and a thousand colonists got away from the western and southern seaports, — Bristol, Plymouth, Wey mouth, Southampton, — in the spring and summer of 1630, Mr. John Winthrop, a man of gentle breeding, of education, of private means, and of the high principles of the best Puritan tradition, a man trained to the law, and, what was much better, schooled in a firm but moderate tem per, sweet yet commanding, going out as governor to supersede Endecott. Thomas Dudley went as his deputy, a man cast in another mould, and of another type, a doughty Puritan soldier who had served under Henry of Navarre; an uncompromising partisan, more man-at-arms than statesman. Want and disease had done their accustomed work among Endecott's people before the new governor and company reached the Bay. Mr. Higginson, who had written them from Salem scarcely a year ago that "a sup of New England's air wras better than a whole draught of old England's ale," was hardly able to stand to preach to them when the}7 landed, a fatal fever having taken hold upon him. It was necessary to separate at once and begin other settlements where Mr. Winthrop's 106 HMBHNBPmh JRnwnMU li s Tttm iUH HI «. W»*TWWTBBBBBI N£VV-ENGLANDS PLANTATION. OR SHORT AND TR VI I) H sCRIP"! ION O] [HI lS COM MOD I ! c-r th« Counuev, bv a rcuercnJ i");ia ' there rcfidcnt. LONDON, Printed by T.Cand^.Cfor Mt dwtllhig at the Signe of rlie ^ Grct»e Arkcr in the little O/ 1630, in TITLE-PAGE OF FRANCIS HIGGINSON'S BOOK A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE people might prepare shelter for the winter. As soon as possible, therefore, places were chosen. Watertown, Roxbury, Boston, Dorchester were begun, and the prep aration of Charlestown, already begun before their com ing, was pushed forward, — all places far within the Ba\T, where groups of sheltering islands shouldered out the heavier seas, and harbors were quiet. But the work was sadly belated. Autumn had come and was gone before much could be accomplished. A full hundred of the immigrants lost heart and went back with the ships to England. Winter found those who remained short of food and still without sufficient shelter, and want arid disease claimed two hundred victims among them. Even the ships the}7 despatched hastily to Eng land for corn brought very little when they came again, for grain was scarce and dear at home also. With the spring came health and hope again, as al ways; but bad news, too. Those who had returned home disheartened had spread damaging reports about the colony, not only telling of the sore straits it was in to live, but also declaring that Mr. Winthrop and his people had openly repudiated the Church of England and turned separatists, like the people at Plymouth. It was difficult to quiet these reports, because they were practically true. It was not easy to explain away what had undoubtedly been done. Both the immigrants with Mr. Endecott at Salem and those who had come with Mr. Winthrop had left home members of the Church of England : Puritans and reformers, indeed, but still not separatists, and publicly professing a wrarm loyalty for the mother Church. "We esteem it an honor/' they had said, as they uttered their final partings at Yar mouth, "to call the Church of England, from whence 108 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH we rise, our dear mother/' " We shall always rejoice in her good, . . . and while we have breath sincerely de sire and endeavor the continuance and abundance of MYLES STANDISH her welfare, with the enlargement of her bounds." And yet Endecott had hardly begun his settlement at Salem before he took counsel with Mr. Brewster and other lead- 109 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ers at Plymouth, and rearranged both the worship and the government of his church after their model. Mr. Winthrop's people had done the same. Those who pro tested and showred themselves unwilling to accept the new ways of church government were compelled either to conform or return home to England. The whole thing looked like the carrying out of a deliberate plan made beforehand to get rid of the Church as well as of the government of England : to set up a separate church along with a separate commonwealth. They could hardly say that it was the necessary result of their removal to a distant continent; for the numerous body of Englishmen long ago settled in Vir ginia had done nothing of the sort, though they main tained their own churches. The Virginians had re mained staunch supporters of the Church as it was at home. Their own assembly had passed strict laws to enforce the accustomed discipline of the English Church and to protect its forms of worship. It could not be said that they did not love their freedom as much as the settlers at Plymouth and the Bay loved theirs. They were glad enough to have an ocean between them and the bishops, did not hesitate to discard the surplice, simplified their worship as they pleased, and took leave to make very free use of the opportunity to rule their own affairs. But they loved none the less the ancient Church in which they had been bred, and they meant to maintain it. Virginia had been planted before the full warmth of the Puritan temper had made itself felt in England, when it was esteemed a reproach to be called a sepa ratist, and a proud duty \vhich went along with a man's allegiance to hold fast to the standards of the nation's no • - '-' * c** k> i » <* *• WHOLE ••£* BOOKEOFPSALMES EJJ TRANSLATED mt» ENGLISH f ~SV (JMetre. p£j W Hereunto is prefixed a difcourfe de- * r^ laring not only the lawfullncs, butalfopjG} the neceffity of the heavenly Ordinance ^t?, offinging scripture Plalmcs in jr. theCh ie Churches of God. V *. nr. "•[.:: J LfttHetrordofGodctTveSpIfntetufijin ^-jfej^, IT**, i»4// vrifdomt) fetching and exhort- r.v U . ..- 'J «S d> .1^, jour hearts* , i; . v. ^c " ] f ^tny If e afflicted Jtt hint fr ay %tt»d if rj^'.j Y" i ^ *wy ^ mrrr; /« hint firtgpfa/mes. ^ o Imprinted TITLE-PAGE OF THE "BAY PSALM BOOK" A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE Church. Virginia had been recruited, too, as she grew, not out of a special class like the Puritans, with a cause at their hearts, but out of the general body of the English people, in whose lives and thoughts the disputes which grew so keen from year to year within the Church play ed very little part. They had brought their religious beliefs and their forms of worship with them to Virginia as habits in their blood, unseparated and undistin guished from their English citizenship. The new set tlers on Massachusetts Bay, on the contrary, had been selected out of a special class. They were men bent for conscience' sake upon setting up a particular stand ard of their own both in church and in state. They had a deliberate plan from the first to withdraw them selves from the general body of Englishmen and es tablish in America what should seem to them "a due form of government, both civil and ecclesiastical." " God sifted a whole nation that He might send choice grain out into this wilderness," one of their own preachers said. They tried to explain away their novel proceed ings when they wrote to persons of influence at home; they tried to persuade even themselves that they were not separatists, but only a distant and necessarily distinct fragment of the Church of England, of the form which they hoped and expected to see that great Church some day assume; but they were, in fact, found ing a separate establishment which denied the author ity' of the mother Church altogether. Virginia had slowly grown to a population of five thousand while the Puritans organized their company and transported it to America. Virginians bore them selves very much as Englishmen did everywhere. There 112 A VIRGINIA PLANTER WITH HIS ATTENDANTS IN HIS BOAT ON THE JAMES RIVER i.— 8 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE was nothing peculiar about them except their hardihood, as of frontiersmen, and their knowledge of how life was to be managed and set forward in a wilderness. It had not made much difference among them that the Virginia Company was dissolved and the colony put into the hands of the King. For the first four years that followed the change no assemblies were summoned, it is true, and they were ruled by the governors and the governors' councils whom the King appointed. But the governors chosen by the King during those years were men of their own number, their trusted friends, al ready experienced in their affairs, men whom the com pany also had employed. Leading men of the colo ny were appointed to the council also. The general interest was consulted, though there were no elections. Before a governor not to the people's taste was put over them the old practice of calling assemblies had been resumed. Virginians wished their individual rights to be left untouched, and watched their govern ment narrowly to see that it did not impose upon them; but their life went well enough, and they were not disposed to seek radical changes either in church or state. They were not settled in close groups, and were not always discussing their common affairs, as men do who live together in towns or organize themselves in compact neighborhoods for business. There was no real town in the colony, except Jamestown. The homes of the colony were scattered through wide neighborhoods along the margins of the rivers, which flowed broad and deep and from every quarter, the natural highways of the place. Each planter farmed as much of the fertile land as he could; but he planted little for sale 114 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH DUTCH WEST INDIA COMPANY'S HOUSE, HAARLEM STREET, AMSTERDAM except tobacco. His tobacco he shipped awa}T in vessels which came to his own wharf and the wharves of his neighbors to be laden. It was not hard to live in that genial climate. Great clearings had at last been made; "5 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE the sun had been let wholesomely in to take the fever ish vapors of the forest off, and the land had begun to yield health as well as abundance. Secluded country churches were the neighborhood gathering places of the colony, for talk as well as for worship. Planters made their way to Jamestown down the rivers in their own boats, or through the quiet paths of the forest on horse back, to be present at the gathering of the 'assembly, or to attend the quarterly meetings of the governor's council, at which lawsuits were heard and determined. It was all a leisurely way of life, and was not apt to / bring changes rapidly about so long as the King suffered them to enjoy their reasonable liberty as Englishmen and did not put men who wished to rule overmuch into their governor's chair. New Netherland grew also, in a way which might have looked to a chance visitor very like the growih of Virginia. The Dutch West India Company had found that if they kept to the plan with which they had begun, they could not hope to make anything more than a mere trading station out of their slow-growing settlement at Fort Amsterdam. The council of the company, ac cordingly, determined to offer large tracts of land to any one who would send over at his own cost fifty adult settlers, with stores and equipment, — and with the land extraordinary powers of independent control, which should constitute the owrner a sort of feudal prince, as " patroon " and lord of his estate. The offer had in it the enticing prospect of dignity and power and safe wealth, such as the landed gentry of Holland had time out of mind enjoyed and the merchants of the towns had envied them as long, and some were tempted, as the 116 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH company had hoped. Some rich men did bestir them selves to send settlers over, and great stretches of the best land on both the North and the South rivers of New Netherland were presently made over to private owners. It was no easier, however, for private individuals than it had been for the company to bring the land success- ENGLISH GENTLEMAN, 1633 ENGLISH GENTLEWOMAN, 1631 fully under cultivation, or to establish settlements which would thrive and endure; and the new way of building up the colony went as slowrly as the old. Many of the new proprietors failed; only a few succeeded. The most notable of the estates which were actually peopled and established \vas that of Kilian van Rensselaer, 117 VOL I. 10 A HISTORY OF THK AMERICAN PEOPLE the wealthy jeweller of Amsterdam, which stretched for miles upon either bank of the North River in the fertile region far up the stream where the company's Fort Orange stood, and where the heart of the fur trade with the Indians was. Even where this new way of growth succeeded, how ever, it was in fact very different from the slow and nat ural spread of broad plantations in Virginia, where no man was by law more privileged than another. The Dutch farmers and peasants who slowly filled the es tates of the patroons with tenants were not like the free a^iJ / I SIGNATURE OF KILIAN VAN RKNSSELAER, PATROON yeomen of the southern colony of the English. They were just as little like the New England colonists to the northward. Among these settlement had still another way of growth. They did not develop by the slow spreading of private estates along the river valleys. The New England valleys were not fertile; the rivers were not deep or broad enough to be the highways of the colony. The sort of government the Puritan set tlers wished to maintain, moreover, would have been almost impossible had the people not kept together in close groups for common action and worship. The governor and company who ruled Massachusetts Bay governed there very watchfully in the midst of the set tlements, and took care to know the men to whom they 118 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH made grants of land. Sometimes they made grants to individuals for special services or liberal contribu tions to the company's funds; but usually they gave land only to bands of settlers who meant to form com munities, and who were under the leadership of persons whom the governor and his associates trusted. The new settlers of each locality owned their lands jointly, as if they were a corporation. Their " town meeting " determined what portion each individual among them was to have for his own use. No other settlers could join them unless admitted by their town meeting to the partnership. All local affairs were managed by officers whom the town meeting elected. Each town, the new est no less than Salem or Charlestown or Roxbury or Boston, was its own mistress, except when matters which the company determined in the common interest were to be acted on. In each town there were " selectmen " chosen to ad minister the general business of the town; constables to keep order; cowherds to take the cattle to the com mon pasture, keep them there while their owners did their tasks through the day, and bring them back at sunset; swineherds to drive the swine to their feeding and return them safe in the evening ; a hay ward to catch stray beasts and keep them fast till they were claimed : a man for each simple duty. The swineherd made his way along the village streets early in the morning, sound ing his horn, and every man who had swine brought them out to him at the summons to join his noisy pro cession, going forth to the woods for their feeding for the day. The cowherd took all his lowing charges to pasture from a common pen, to which their owners brought them in the grey of the dawn, and was charged 119 V*^Y«- FACSIMILE OF ORDER CREATING BOARD OF SELECTMEN, CHARLESTOWN, 1634 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH to be back with them ere the sun should set. The town meeting decided all things, small and great. It did not hesitate to order in what way the houses should be set and roofed and distributed along the street, and their gardens disposed about them. In Newtown the free men ordered by vote that all houses within the village "be covered with slate or board, and not with thatch, " and that they be built so that they should " range even " and stand just six feet from the street. Every freeman and proprietor of the village had his vote in the meet ing, and deemed himself self - governed when it gov erned him. The government of the colony as a whole was by no means so democratic. The "company" governed; and the company consisted only of those who were admitted as " freemen " by its own vote. At first there were only twenty such among all the thousand settlers at the Bay, and twelve of these twentj" were the officers of the com pany. By slow degrees the number was enlarged; but the company wras very reluctant and very cautious about increasing its membership. Four years went by before there were so many as three hundred and fifty " freemen/' and by that time there were more than three thousand settlers. The new and very severe rule was adopted that no one should be chosen a freeman who was not a member of some one of the churches of the settlements. In England every subject was reckoned by law a member of the Church of England ; but in Massa chusetts men became members of the churches only l>y profession of faith and upon a searching examination in matters of doctrine and worship. Those who did not hold the strict creed of the Puritan ministers, being ex cluded from the church, were excluded also from voting. 121 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE *' The best part is always the least/' was Mr. Winthrop's sententious doctrine, "and of that best p?rt the wiser part is always the lesser/' The rule of doctrine and church authority did not stop with a restriction in the number of freemen who should vote in the compan3''s general court. Men were fined, whipped, sentenced to have their ears cut off, or banished the colony altogether for speaking scandalously of either the church or the government. Several who had come to the Bay before the Massachusetts Company was formed were so put upon and sought out for prosecu tion by their new masters, the magistrates of the com pany, for their refusal to conform to the new practices in matters of worship, that they finally resisted to the length of bringing sentence of banishment upon them selves, or voluntarily took themselves off to escape the searching tyranny. It was a very rigorous govern ment, under which only those could live and be at ease who professed and proved themselves Puritans; and common men suffered more than gentlemen, after the manner of the age, so that it seemed an aristocratic as well as an ecclesiastical establishment. The King and his ministers over sea did not fail to observe how the company made its colony a stronghold for the obstructive Puritans. The temper of Charles's government grew harsher and harsher during those first years of settlement at the Bay, and became as meddlesome and tyrannical in the 'management of the Church as in the management of the State. In 1633 he had made Laud Archbishop of Canterbury. Now he was backing the implacable primate in a thorough going and pitiless attempt to clear the Church of all Puritans and nonconformists. Laud was quick to see 122 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH WILLIAM LAUD, ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY what comfort the rapidly growing colony at Massa chusetts Bay gave, his enemies, and complained very hotly that it was filling up with persons openly hostile to the King's government. Certain persons connected with the old Council for New England, jealous of the 123 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE prosperous company at the Bay, with its independent royal charter, easily persuaded the all-powerful arch bishop, and through him the law officers of the crown, to take steps to destroy it; and in 1635 the blow came. A judgment was obtained against the Massachusetts charter in the court of King's Bench; the government of the colony was declared transferred into the King's hands, as the government of Virginia had been, and orders were issued which authorized the despatch of a governor - general, to be accompanied, if necessary, by an armed force. Mr. Cradock, who presided over the company's financial board in London, had been summoned by the imperious primate and by my lord Privy Seal to come before them for an explanation, and bring the charter of the company with him; and had been rated ve^ roundly as an "imposturous knave" when he declared that it had been sent over sea with the colonists. But the spiriting away of its charter had not been allowed to stay the judgment against the company. The magistrates at the Bay, when the ugly news reached them, came to the desperate resolution to resist by force. But troubles in England saved them. Their charter was, indeed, in law annulled, but the judgment was not carried out. The King's purse was empty. His subjects were very slow about paying the illegal taxes he demanded of them. Signs of revolution were growing more and more frequent, more and more open and ominous. Charles could not afford to send an expensive expedition out to New England, and was much too anxious about things at home to think very often about the little group of troublesome settlements across the sea. Mr. Winthrop and his associates, 124 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH accordingly, lived quietly on under their forfeited charter, as if nothing had happened, and admitted no one they did not like to the partnership. An introduction to the various phases of the Puritan movement in England, which led to the Puritan exodus to America, may be got in G. H. Curteis's Dissent in its Relation to the Church of Eng land (the Bampton lectures for 1871); in David Masson's Life and Times of Milton ; in D. Neal's History of the Puritans ; in Samuel R. Gardiner's History of England from the Accession of James I., volumes I. and IV. ; in the second volume of J. R. Green's History of the English People ; in G. E. Ellis's Puritan Age and Rule ; and in the second volume of J. A. Doyle's English Colonies in America. The leading general authorities on the history of Massachusetts in the seventeenth century are John Gorham Palfrey's History of New England (1492-1774) and Compendious History of New England (1497-1765); J. A. Doyle's second and third volumes on The English Colonies in America ; John Fiske's Beginnings of New England ; S. R. Drake's The Making of New England ; and Justin Winsor's Memorial History of Boston. Glimpses of some of the most important special aspects of Massa chusetts history are to be had in W. B. Weeden's Economic and Social History of New England ; Charles Francis Adams's Three Episodes of Massachusetts History ; and Herbert B. Adams's Germanic Origin of the New England Towns, published in the first volume of the Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science. Most of the important original sources of Massachusetts history are brought together in John Winthrop's History of New Eng land, edited by J. Savage and The Life and Letters of John Win- throp, edited by R. C. Winthrop ; in the Collections and Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society ; in Alexander Young's Chronicles of Massachusetts ; in the Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay ; in Peter Force's Tracts and Other Papsrs relating to the Colonies in North America ; in the Publications of the Prince Society ; in the papers of the American Antiquarian Society; and in the New Hampshire Historical Col lections. IV. THE PROVINCE OF MARYLAND IT was a thing for statesmen to take note of, and all to wonder at, how Englishmen of all sorts and creeds began to think of America, and to desire homes there, when once it had become evident that Virginia and Plymouth and the Massachusetts settlements were certainly permanent, and colonization no mere scheme of the foolhardy. There were others besides the Puritans who felt uneasy at home in England because of the troubles in church and state and the threatening face of affairs. For men who loved novelty and adventure, life in the New World had always a charm which even direst hardship could not take away; but such men were nowhere in a majority, and it was not mere love of adventure that made the Erglish swarm to America. It was the spirit of liberty and of mastery. It was the most spirited men who were the most uneasy in those evil days of the Stuart kings; ard because they were cramped and thwarted and humbled at home they thought the more often and the more wistfully of the freedom they might find in America. Virginia had been planted and had thriven, it is true, before there was this sting of uneasiness to drive men over sea. She had been created because of the spirit of trade and of conquest, the impulse of international rivalry, the love of gain, and the capacity for independent action which had come to Englishmen in the stirring sixteenth century; and it was, after all, that " ancient, primitive, 126 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH and heroic work of planting the world" which waks to prove the permanent motive of English success in Amer ica. But now, for the time being, there was added to LEAH and RACHEL, OR, the Two FruitfUU Sifter* VIRGINIA, AND MARYLAND-. Their P relent Condition, kn- partial iy ihsted and related. WITH A Rtmwull fffjrtch Ifftprtatioxt AS »rt fc&n-diloxjly fttjl on thaje Countrm t nhtrtly mzny dtcctvcd & ottlit choje rjther to f>rg} Stenl t rot in Trtfortt end ccwe in jbttmtjiitl death}, then it betttT thtir being typing tbitker, wherein is plenty of dl tbinp fn Human* fnAJt^jtnit, By fobn Hammond. EcckC »». t. 8. ' }f ibtlttrrm lint baufib *»d £»w wkn-t*ntJ;t tSty $aM fit a*ij tkt . flume fjtor V*,t*ts. LQ\DQX , Printed by T. Mabb, and are to be fold by Kick. Rwrw, laecrthcRoyali Exchange, 1656. TITLE-PAGE OF HAMMOND'S "LEAH AND RACHEL*' the high spirit of mastery the unquiet spirit of discon tent, and America reaped a double harvest. It happened that Roman Catholics felt almost as uneasy as Puritans. James, it was true, had proved T27 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE himself no Presbyterian, after all, and Charles had put Laud at the head of the Church, as if to carry it back as far as possible towards Rome, if not all the way to Rome itself. But it needed no seer to perceive how the temper of the nation darkened at sight of these things, and no thoughtful Roman Catholic could find sound reason to hope for a long period of toleration. America would no doubt prove a freer place for Roman Catholics as well as for Puritans, and their exodus began the very year Laud became primate. It was for them that Maryland was founded by Cecilius Calvert, Lord Baltimore. It was a scheme he had inherited from his father. Sir George Calvert had been a very noticeable figure when James wras king. He had stood in the Commons, alongside Wentworth, his friend, as spokesman for the King, whose intimate companion and devoted servant all knew7 him to be, facing Sir Edwin Sandys there, to whom the House had looked for leadership since it began to fear that James meant some deep mischief to the liberties of England. There was much to admire in his courtesy, his tact and moderation, his unobtrusive devotion to affairs. He had none of Wentworth's striking initia tive and vigor, and showed a modesty, gentleness, and acquiescence in the service of the court which seemed mere weakness to those who looked on ; and yet he was greatly trusted and won deep esteem. The opponents of the crown in Parliament thought him servile, and sus pected him of being corrupt, like the rest of the King's agents ; but those who knew him said that he acted upon conviction in making^choice which side he should take, and both in public and in private bore himself like a man of honor. 128 GEORGE CALVERT THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH In the last year of the reign he had resigned his officer and withdrawn from the King's service, while still in his prime. He had become a convert to Roman Ca tholicism, had committed himself with the energy of real conviction to bringing about the marriage of Prince Charles to the princess of Spain, and wrould not draw back to please either the prince himself or great Buck ingham, because he deemed both the cause of Catholi cism arid the plighted word of England, given in solemn treaty, involved in the project. His position at court had become untenable, and he withdrew both to save his interest and to give candid expression to his religious convictions. James had created him Baron Baltimore at parting, as a special evidence of his good will, and then Calvert had turned to devote himself to plans of colonization. He had been a large subscriber to the funds of the East India Compam^, had become a mem-, ber of the New England Company, and had served on the commission appointed in 1624 to wind up the affairs of the great Virginia Company. As far back as 1620 he had interested himself in colonizing schemes of his own, while he wras yet in the midst of affairs, — before Plymouth wTas founded. He had bought an extensive tract of land lying on the southern peninsula of NewT- foundland; had put colonists upon it; and when he turned from holding office under the King, had himself gone to reside among his settlers. But a single year in that rigorous climate, with its icy cold from October to May, convinced him it was no place in which to build a colony, especially with the French near at hand to be reckoned \vith, in addition to the weather. The French upon the near-by coasts had not forgotten ho\v Captain Argall had put in at their '•-9 129 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE struggling settlements and burned them, scarcely ten years ago, carrying off cattle and settlers alike as his prize of private war, and meant to have no English for neighbors if they could find means to drive them off. Calvert had stayed his year out at "Avalon" only be cause his ships were as heavily armed and better han dled. The bleak land with " a sad fare of winter " upon it, which let no blade of herbage appear in the earth, nor any fish even in the sea, for close upon eight months together, seemed hardly worth fighting for. He turned his thoughts southward, therefore, and in 1629, — the very year Parliaments ceased to sit and the Massachusetts people got their charter, — asked King Charles to grant them lands on either side the great Bay of Chesapeake, close by Virginia : from the Potomac northward and eastward, across the Bay, to the fortieth degree of north latitude and the river and bay of Delaware. All this was land granted long ago to the Virginia Company; but the Virginia Company was dead; the King had resumed his sovereign rights with the withdrawal of its charter, — cared very little whether he twice granted the same thing or not, — and was Calvert's friend, as his father had been before him. The Virginian colonists were hot against the grant, and many influential persons in England, who seemed to hope still to see the old Virginia Company revived, protested to the Privy Council against it. But though they held the matter off for a year and a half, until Cal vert was dead, they did not prevent it. The charter was issued in 1632, and Cecilius Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, carried out his father's plans in his father's spirit. It had been evident from the first that George Calvert 130 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH had meant his colony to be, among other things, a place of refuge, freedom, and safety for men of his own faith. There had long been stories afloat in London how he had carried Romish priests with him to Newfoundland, and had celebrated mass there every Sunday. He had named his colony there Avalon because it wras at Glas- tonbury, which men had once called Avalon, in old Som ersetshire, that the Church of Rome had first set up her altars in Britain. The colonists wrhom Cecilius Calvert sent out to Maryland late in the autumn of 1633 \vere by no means all Romanists, but probably quite half of them were; and Jesuit priests, who had covertly come aboard after the ships left the Thames, went wdth them to act as their spiritual leaders and preceptors in the New World. Protestants and Catholics, however, consorted very comfortably together on the voyage and after the landing. It was no part of Lord Baltimore's purpose to be a proselytizer and make converts of all w^hom he sent out, and he was too cool and prudent a man to \vish to set up a colony to which none but Roman Catholics should be admitted. He knew very well how all England would soon be talking and pro testing about such a colony as that, should he attempt it. He meant only to make a place so free that Roman Catholics might use full liberty of worship there no less than Protestants, for he knew that there wras as yet no such place in America. His colonists reached their new home in March, 1634, and chose for their place of settlement a high bluff which rose upon the eastern bank of a little stream which emptied itself into the great Potomac but a little way from the Bay. The mighty Potomac, flowing silent between its wride banks there in the lonely wilderness, 131 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE THE SECOND LORD BALTIMORE made a deep impression on them. 'The Thames, compared with it/' they said, "can scarcely be con sidered a rivulet. It is not rendered impure by marshes, but on each bank of solid earth rise beautiiul groves 132 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH of trees, not choked up with an undergrowth of brambles and bushes, but as if laid out by the hand, in a manner so open that you might easily drive a four-horse chariot in the midst of the trees." It was this broad and stately stream which was to be their boundary line, separating them from Virginia. Lord Baltimore called his prov ince Maryland, in honor of the queen, and the first settlement there on the bluff they called St. Mary's, in honor of the Virgin. It was a very bitter thing to the Virginians that they should be obliged thus to give up all the fair region of the upper Bay to these new-comers, whom they disliked equally as intruders and as papists; and feeling ran so high among them against Lord Baltimore's people that they deemed it an intolerable sort of treason for any man to speak so much as a kind word concerning them. They knew that they might themselves once have had all the Bay for the taking, and now the King had granted it away forever. They had, indeed, es tablished a trading outpost on Kent's Island, which lay within reach of the spreading stream of the great Susquehanna, the noble river which brought its waters to the Bay all the long way which lay between Virginia and the forest haunts of the mighty Iroquois at the north, — the forests whence the rich furs came which all the continent coveted. Mr. Clayborne, who was of the governor's council, had interested himself to make commerce there with the natives; and Mr. Clayborne, with his good estates and high credit in Virginia, his influential commercial connections in London, his indomitable will and strong relish for action, was an ill man to oust. He insisted not only upon his own rights of property in the island, which no man of Lord 133 •A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE Baltimore's interest would have denied or interfered with, but also upon Virginia's jurisdiction over it. There could be no questioning the fact, nevertheless, that the island lay within the King's new grant; and though Mr. Clayborne begged aid of the Privy Council at home, and even put arms into the hands of his servants to keep his own by force, it was of no avail. The King's grant made Lord Baltimore master, and Mr. Clayborne had to stomach as best he could the unpalatable necessity of submitting. Maryland's settlers had come to sta}T, and yearly spread and multiplied; and the Virginians in due time let their anger cool. Singular good fortune and prov ident good management made them secure from the first against any starving time such as there had been at Jamestown, or any bitter struggle to live and make a beginning. They had found an Indian village at St. Mary's where they landed, long established and set in the midst of open fields cultivated and read}^ for the plough. The Indians , whose home the place had been1 freely sold them both its wigwams and its fallow clearings, for a few hatchets and hoes and a little cloth. Before the white men came" they had resolved to quit the region, to be rid of fear of the Susquehannocks, the terrible Iroquois neighbors whose inroads made peace impossible. Here were cornfields ready for the planting, therefore, and the very first autumn of their stay in that wide wilderness the new colonists had grain enough to send a shipload to New England, to be exchanged for salt codfish. The Virginians, for all they hated them, did not refuse to sell them cattle and swine at a profit; and want was not an enemy they needed to reckon with. Maryland turned out another Virginia in its ways 134 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH of life and government. In form, indeed, its govern ment was very different. The King had no direct au thority there. Lord Baltimore was made by his charter literally proprietor of the colony, — a sort of feudal prince, from whom, and not from the King, all titles and all authority were to be derived. He was empowered to confer rank even, and set up a kind of nobility, should he choose; and though his charter obliged him to sub mit such laws and regulations as he might think best to impose upon his province to the approval of the free men of the colony, or their deputies, "called together for the framing of laws/' that need have restrained him little more than the King was restrained b}^ the Par liament at home. He could create "manors/' also, with their separate courts, and proprietors as inde pendent, almost, as the barons of old ; and as the colony grew he did bestow here and there, upon a few of the richer men among his colonists, these greater gifts of privilege. The King had meant to reproduce in him the ancient powers of the stout churchmen who had kept the northern border against the Scot, and had had their separate sovereignty, as if of independent princes, for reward, making of their majestic cathedral on the high banks of Wear — " Half house of God, Half castle 'gainst the Scot." He was to have, said his charter, "as ample rights, jurisdictions, privileges, prerogatives, royalties, liberties, immunities, and royal rights as any bishop of Durham within the bishopric or county palatine of Durham, with in our kingdom of England." But, notwithstanding his power was so great on paper, 135 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN P*1' he did not in fact use it to give the colony a apart. Assemblies of the freemen met and - with the proprietor in Maryland as they had , made terms with the company in Virginia. At first, while all the settlers were still wdthin easy reach of St. Mary's, there were no elections. The freemen came themselves instead of choosing representatives. It was only by slow degrees that a system of elections was established. But in the end things were arranged there very much as they were arranged in Virginia, in mat ters of government no less than in matters of daily life. There wrere broad rivers in Maryland as in Virginia, and ships traded from wharf to wharf upon them as in the older colony. There were few villages and many spreading plantations. Virginians might have felt that there wras practically little difference between their o\vn colony and Lord Baltimore's, had they not seen Roman Catholics enjoy rights of worship there wrhich were not granted them in Virginia. Virginians were expected to observe the ritual and order of the Church of England. Only in Maryland was there freedom in such matters, and the freedom there made Virginians feel, uneasily, that Maryland was in some unlawful way a Jesuit and papist refuge, which would bear jeal ous watching. The two colonies might speedily have forgot their differences but for that. Authorities on the history of Maryland during the seventeenth century. The most trustworthy general authorities are John Leeds Bozman's History of Maryland (1632-1660); William Hand Browne's Maryland : the History of a Palatinate ; John V. L. McMahon's An Historical View of the Government of Maryland ; the first volume of J. A. Doyle's English Colonies in America ; William T. Brantly's English in Maryland, 1632-1691, in the third volume of Winsor's Narrative and Critical History of America ; 136 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH Edward D. Neill's Terra Mariae ; Bancroft and Hildreth's general histories ; and the excellent monographs scattered here and there in the nineteen volumes of the Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science. The more important original sources are to be found in the Alary- land Archives, edited by W. Hand Browne ; in the Fund Publica tions of the Maryland Historical Society ; in Bacon's Laws of Mary, land ; in Peter Force's Tracts and Other Papers relating to the Colonies in North America ; in W. Hazard's Historical Collections, Consisting of State Papers and Other Documents: and in Stedman and Hutchinson's Library of American Literature. V. THE EXPANSION OF NEW ENGLAND AVHILE Maryland was being established, a county palatine, and Virginians accommodated their life and temper to the intrusion, affairs moved with strong tide in New England, and the whole face of the country was changed for the English, the Indians, and the Dutch alike. During the ten years 1630-1640, the first ten years after Mr. Winthrop's company came to Boston, a great and ever-increasing immigration poured steadily in at the Bay. These were the years during which there was no Parliament in England, the years during which the government at home seemed most intolerable, and the Puritan colonies in America most inviting, to all Englishmen who took their politics and their religion seriously. No fewer than twenty thousand people came within that single decade to seek homes in Ne\v Eng land. In 1634 fourteen ships came in at the Bay with settlers in the single month of June, and the next sum mer eleven came in in a single day. In 1638 three thousand immigrants arrived within a space of three months. There could be no pause in events while such a tide was running. Most of the new-comers found the Bay settlements altogether to their liking, and made their homes there very contentedly. They did not object to the strictness of the church government set up by the masterful rulers of the Massachusetts towns, for they were themselves 138- A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE Puritans almost to a man, and liked very well to see their own opinions made compulsory. It did not in commode them that the sterner ministers of th'> settle ments made bold to imitate his Grace of Canterbury and silence those who differed with them. It was an age "when every sect demanded tolerance, yet none had the generosity to grant it/' and it was very com fortable to dwell with your own sect. There was a great deal besides the church in New England, — a great deal to make the novel life in the wilderness stirring and interesting, and worth taking part in. The government, it was true, tried to regulate everything, just as the government at home did: made laws as to what wages should be paid to laborers, what prices should be charged by the merchants; pre scribed what uses the farmer should make of his corn, how the fisheries should be conducted, and the f;ir trade with the Indians carried on. But it was not so easy to enforce such regulations as it was to make them. Fishermen fished in the open sea, upon a long coast, where there were few magistrates; fur traders carried on their barter with the Indians in the depths of the forest; merchants quietly took whatever purchasers were willing to pay ; farmers used their land as they thought most profitable and advantageous; and the- simple life of the colony was freer than life in England, after all. There was not a little uneasiness and disquiet, never theless. These stirring, austere, uncompromising Puri tans, who had crossed the sea to live in a wilderness rather than submit to Laud and the King, were not likely to be all of one mind, or always submissive to one another when they differed; and within less than five 140 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH years after Mr. Winthrop's first company had established themselves at the Bay signs of a partial breaking up began to appear. Each town was a sort of little common wealth, and every town followed its minister, if he was of the mettle to lead. Some came from one quarter of the old land which had bred them all, some from another, some from quiet hamlets or rustic country-sides, some from busy towns; and each group, choosing its own place of neighborhood and settlement, kept its own flavor of local habit. And not the flavor of local habit only, but its own favorite views, also, it might be, upon questions of doctrine and polity, or its own strong preferences as to liberty of worship. Congre gations had and kept their several characters; the politics of the growing commonwealth sprang out of their differences; and their ministers were their politi cians. The Reverend Thomas Hooker, of Newtown, and the Reverend John Cotton, of Boston, were, in those first days, the most notable men among all the ministers of the colonies. Laud had picked both of them out as heretics specially to be feared and disciplined; they had been obliged to make their escape very secretly from England, and had been welcomed at the Bay with a special satisfaction and distinction of greeting upon their landing, in 1633. They were both scholars, and both orators whom it moved men to hear ; but they were of opposite views and unlike tempers in dealing with affairs. It was observed after Mr. Hooker was settled at Newtown "that many of the freemen grew very jealous of their liberties." The men of Watertown, near by, ventured to protest very strongly against be- 141 -A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ing taxed for a fort to be built at Newtown, notwith standing it was meant to serve in case of need against a common enemy; and it was not doubted that Mr. Hooker's very liberal opinions in matters of govern ment had spread to them, and inclined them thus to press their independence. He was very downright, very formidable in debate; Newtown was contesting with Boston the right to be considered the capital and centre of the Bay settlements; the freemen of the lesser towns looked to it for leadership, and found Mr. Hooker clear in counsel and fit to lead. Mr. Cotton's views were much more to the liking of the magistrates. "Democrac\r/' he said, "I do not conceive that God ever did ordain as a fit government either for church or commonwealth. If the people be governors, who shall be governed?" He had, more over, "such an insinuating and melting way in his preaching that he would usually carry his very ad versary captive/' — a man less rugged than Mr. Hooker, more fitted to charm, the nrystical power of a poet and the winning force of an ardent evangelist set forth for all to see in his fine eyes, his ruddy countenance, his locks of chestnut brown, his carriage as of a man sure of his mission and of his mastery. The magistrates generally invited him to preach, accordingly, at every crisis in affairs, to the freemen or to the courts which wrere to decide what to do, and he had presently such an ascendency "that whatever he delivered in the pulpit was soon put into an order of court or set up as a prac tice in the church." The Newtown people, who deemed Mr. Hooker no less a master of wise speech and sound doctrine than Mr. Cotton, and Mr. Haynes, their chief citizen, as worthy to be governor as Mr. Winthrop 142 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH Cotton JOHN COTTON himself, or Mr. Dudley, one or the other of whom the freemen seemed determined always to choose, grew jealous of a government which seemed to lie so entirely with Boston. They found the combined government of church and company itself a little burdensome. The water, too, at their wharves was too shallow, the soil on their fields too thin, and they were straitened for lack of meadow. Interest, pride, and opinion were very subtly compounded in their disquietude, and neither soft words nor harsh could rid them of it. 143 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE They were too loyal and too prudent to wish to disturb the peace and order of the colony by insisting too stren uously or too hastily upon having their own way; but they did not dissemble their discontent, and asked leave of the company's government to remove to another place of settlement. There was not a little alarm and opposition when it was learned that they wished actually to go outside the Massachusetts grant and establish themselves entirely apart on the distant Connecticut. But it became evident very soon that their spirits were too strongly bent upon their new purpose to be restored to ease or contentment where they were. Moreover, the same desire to get away began to show itself else where, — in Watertown and Roxbury and Dorchester; and, with great bodies of new settlers constantly coming in, there seemed no conclusive reason why they should be held, unwilling, within the colony. Though the matter had to be fought through long debates and many delays, therefore, the magistrates at last felt themselves constrained to grant Newtown's petition ; and the people of Watertown, Roxbury, and Dorchester chose to con sider themselves included in the permission. The three years 1635-1637 saw a notable migration begin. By the spring of 1637 there were fully eight hundred settlers on the banks of the Connecticut and on the shores of the Sound below. Dutch seamen had discovered the Connecticut so long ago as 1614, when the Virginia Company wras still young, and the Massachusetts colony not yet thought of. They had explored also the shores of the Sound below, and both river and Sound had seen their trading boats pass often to and fro these many years. The Dutch had seen the English multiplying fast at 144 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH Plymouth and the Bay of Massachusetts; had realized that they must be quick to secure what they had dis covered and meant to claim; had formally purchased a tract of land from the Indians at the mid-course of the Connecticut; and at last, just before the English came, had built a little fort there to mark their possession, placing it at the fine turn of the river to which, as it fell out, Mr. Hooker also and his congregation from MINOT HOUSE, DORCHESTER Newtown were presently to take a fancy. The Dutch agent in charge had hardly got further in his first work there than the throwing up of an earthen redoubt or two and the planting of a couple of small guns, and had but just named his post "Good Hope" (1633), when the English began to come. Men from Plymouth came first, to build a trading post, and then there followed these congregations from the Bay, as careless of the rights of the Plymouth men as of the rights of the Dutch. 145 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE When once their coming had begun they crowded in faster and faster, closer and closer, despite every protest. Not many years went by before they were ploughing the very piece of land upon which the little Dutch fort stood, saying that it was a shame to let good bot tom soil lie idle. Governor Winthrop had sent word to Van Twiller, the Dutch commander at Fort Amsterdam, that he must not build upon the Connecticut. It lay, he said, within the territories of the King of England. But Van Twiller had replied that he held the lands upon the SIGNATURE OF WOUTER VAN TWILLER river by as good a title, in the name of the States General of Holland and the authorized West India Company. "In this part of the world are divers heathen lands that are empty of inhabitants/7 he had pleaded, "so that of a little part or portion thereof there need not be any question." The tide of English immigrants swept in, nevertheless: a few from Plymouth, a great many from the Bay. The Dutch blustered and threatened and protested; but they did nothing more, and were soon outnumbered and surrounded. "These people give it out," reported a Dutch sea-captain returned from the river, "that they are Israelites, and that we at our colony are Egyptians." They called their own 146 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH countrymen in Virginia the same. It was their mission to set tip Puritan commonwealths. Those who were not of their faith and order of living were but a better kind of heathen whom they hoped either to oust or to keep at a safe distance. In 1635 settlers from Water town began to build upon the river, six miles below the Dutch at Good Hope, at a place which they presently called Wethersfield. The same year Dorchester people came and sat themselves down beside the little group of protesting Plymouth men at Windsor. There were men in England as well as at the Bay who had cast their eyes upon the valley of the Connecticut as a place to be desired, and they also chose this time to make ready for planting a colony. Lord Say and Sele, Lord Brooke, and others, men of consequence, friends and correspondents of the gentle men at the Bay, had obtained a grant of lands upon the lower Connecticut and upon the shores of the Sound, as far east as the river of the Narragansetts and as far west as they chose, so long ago as 1631, from the Earl of Warwick, President of the Council for New England; and chose this very time of the migration from the Bay to make their claim good. In 1635 they sent out John Winthrop the younger, the Bay governor's genial and capable son, as governor in their name "of the River Connecticut with the places adjoining/' and close upon his heels sent Lieutenant Lion Gardiner, a stout soldier bred to war, like so many another, in the service of the Low Countries, to build fortifications which should make them sure of whatever Mr. Winthrop might occupy. Mr. Winthrop made no serious trouble for the newr set tlers already come from the Bay. The action of their lordships his employers was friendly, not hostile; his VOL. I.-I2 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE own temper was easy and accommodating ; Lieutenant Gardiner was detained at Boston a little while to assist with his expert advice at the construction of fortifications on Fort Hill, ere he went on to the Connecticut; and the fort which he built at the river's mouth when at last he went forward on his errand, though stout enough to guard the place against all comers, was used onry to keep the Dutch off. That very year, 1636, Mr. Hooker came with a hundred settlers from Newtown and joined DUTCH FORT — "GOOD HOPE" some pioneers who had gone before him and planted themselves, as most unwelcome neighbors, close along side the Dutch at Good Hope, calling their settlement Hartford. It had been no easy matter to struggle through the dense tangle of the almost pathless forests all the long ninety miles which lay between these new regions and the Bay. There were household goods and stores to be carried; there were cattle to be fed and driven all the long way; there were women and children to be 148 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH thought of and spared; and those who made the hard journey spent weeks of weary travelling and lonely camping in those vast forests, which seemed to spread everywhere without border or any limit at all. Even boats could not be expected to make the journey round about by sea unless they chose their season ; for when winter came the river was apt to be choked with ice. But these Puritans were not men to be daunted, as the Dutch found to their cost. The journey was made again and again and again, by party after party, as if there were no obstacles which even the women need dread. Uneasy congregations were not the only people to quit the Bay in that day of eager movement, when men came by the thousands out of England; and the Con necticut was not the only goal of the new emigration. Many a man, many a family who found the rule of the Massachusetts magistrates over irksome, turned their eyes southward and went the shorter journey, of but a little more than forty miles, which carried them through Plymouth's grant of lands into the country of the Nar- ragansetts beyond, where deep rivers and a spreading bay, dotted with inviting islands, made an open way to the sheltered seas of the great Sound below. These shores and islands soon became a place of refuge for all who were specially thrust out from the Bay settle ments for errors of life or opinion, and for all who volun tarily quit the austere churches there in search of an absolute individual freedom, such as was not to be had even with Mr. Hooker on the Connecticut. Roger Williams had led the way thither in 1636, the year Mr. Hooker went to Hartford. Mr. Williams was a man whom his very enemies were constrained to love, when they had hearts under their jackets, — even while they 149 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE sincerely condemned his opinions. He had come to the Bay almost as soon as Mr. Winthrop himself, in February, 1631, in a ship which put in weather-beaten amidst a great drift of ice; and, though a mere youth, had given the magistrates trouble from the first. He was only the son of a merchant tailor of London; but nature had bestowed upon him gifts of mind and tongue which put him in a way to succeed as he pleased. He had become protege arid friend of the great Lord Coke, had got his training at Cambridge, and then had turned his back on all "gains and preferments in universities, city, country, and court/' for the sake of absolute liberty of conscience and belief. He would no more accept what he did not believe at the Bay than in England. He upbraided the congregations there which had not openly separated from the Church of England; he denied the validity of the colony's charter, saying that the Indians alone, and not the King, owned and could grant the land; and he declared that magistrates had no rightful power except over a man's body and goods, and were wrong when they tried to command what men should believe and how they should worship. The magistrates at the Bay could not permit such views as these to be preached and keep their authority. Mr. Williams had a most tender arid outspoken con science upon all things, and was often enough a mere "haberdasher of small questions/' as Mr. Cotton said in tart jest; but he raised great questions, too, and his rea soning as often as not struck at the very foundations of the curious structure of government the Puritan magis trates had been at such pains to rear. They were in effect separatists, if you but looked at them from the other side of the water ; and yet they did not suffer their 150 § PLATFORM CF § S CHURCH DISCIPLINE ffl f*i qsiTHERED OVT OF THE WORD OF GOD: *j# •+47{eD siGkEET) VPON BT THE SLDERSi gg AND MESSENGERS OF THE CHURCHES 5?? *f» ASSfcj>»BLcU i.M THb SY.\OO AT CAMhtUD^h £'r,4 /A' t;'*/ £*\o£.v^A'D kfe5 To be prefented to the Churches and Gencrall Court for their confiderat.on and acceptance, t-3 in the Lord . . ^J The Eight Moneth Anno i 6 4 p j^ f| . p y . _ , , ... ^ » Pi J : S| i, //a;v -4mlAUe we thy i \ilem teles 0 L>jrd of ffofts ? ^A IS ^*-i : **6 ^ * LordJ h.i'tc loved. -K' tutWMun oj thy hj,qe V ths *^_ pLce vc-Jire ih nt h^n^ur dwslletti « f^j P.rtl ; 2.7. i. » O«f -.hingh -4Vc / dsiiftd uj th:-L>,d thrt :v;// / j^^. C^lj £• , liMi m*1 ttoi.il m the baa/e <>f the Lird ail the GJJS d- j .i of my lift ! > itffotti ike titMttj of the L»fd CT /* *^ e;3 *?•» cv>» * ««**ai >^a cz;^ 131 «? Printed by S Cy at Cambridge m 7\Tw f^A*^ ^ and are to.be fold at Ctmbndy and !3w/w«i ?|| Ri - TITLE-PAGE OF THE CAMBRIDGE PLATFORM A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE several churches and congregations to select or main tain what doctrines and practices they pleased. Synods ruled opinion, magistrates enforced their conclusions and their discipline, and Mr. Cotton, set high in the Boston pulpit where the chief men of the government were his disciples and parishioners, was a sort of bishop and primate of the churches. The masters of the Bay had no mind to let Mr. Williams speak or teach as he pleased. And yet it was five years before they made up their minds that he must be expelled from the colony. He was so gentle, so sweet-tempered, so ready to reason calmly with those who differed with him, so awkward to worst in an argument, so passionately loved by all his friends, so mildly hated by most of his foes, that they hesitated again and again what to do. It was unquestionable, nevertheless, that he kept the minds of the Salem people, to whom he preached, in something very like an attitude of rebellion towards the governing authorities of the colony; and at last he was driven out, obliged to fly secretly, even, lest they should seize and send him back to England. Undoubtedly he bred discord and contention wherever he went. He had lived for two years at Plymouth, to escape perse cution at the Bay, before the final breach came; and even there, where they were inclined to be almost as lib eral as he in matters of opinion, he had made trouble. "A man godly and zealous/' the kindly Bradford had pronounced him, "having many precious gifts, but very unsettled in judgment/' And so he became a fugitive, and went with four devoted companions, in the midst of bitter winter weather, deep into the icy for ests to the southward, to find covert for a sensitive conscience be}^ond the grants of the crown. 152 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH And then, almost immediately, he was able to do t1- men who had banished him an inestimable service. That very summer (1637) war came,— war with the bold and dangerous Pequots, the Indian masters of the Con- UNCAS AND HIS SQUAW. THEIR MARKS necticut and the shores of the Sound; and nobody but Roger Williams could have held the Narragansett tribes off from joining them to destroy the settlements. A hostile union and concerted onset of all the tribes, effected then, as the Pequots plotted, might have meant annihilation. There were but five thousand English men, even yet, scattered in the settlements, and such a rising put eve^thing at stake. The Narragansetts occupied the lands which lay between Plymouth and the valley of the Connecticut. Mr. Williams had been much among them while he lived at Plymouth; had learned their language, and thoroughly won their liking. 153 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE Their keen and watchful eyes had seen how true and frank and steadfast he was, and how sincere a friend. They had given him lands very gladly when he came among them a fugitive; and now they hearkened to him rather than to the fierce Pequot chiefs, whom he faced at the risk of his life at their very council fires. The magistrates of the Bay had begged his interven- MIANTOXOMO. HIS MARK tion, and he had undertaken it cheerfully. Such was the generous nature of the man. The Pequots had grown very hot against the English crowding in. No Englishman's life was safe anywhere, upon the river or the Sound, because of them through the anxious winter of 1636-1637. Men at Lieutenant Gardiner's little fort at Say brook hardly dared venture forth for fuel or forage. When summer came, therefore, the settlers set themselves ruthlessly to exterminate the tribe. A single bloody season of fire and the sword, and the work was done: the braves of the tribe were slain or driven forth in little despairing groups to the far Hudson in the west ; the few women who survived were taken and made slaves of. The terrible business cleared all the river valley and all the nearer regions by the Sound, and English settlers began to pour in again with a new heart. Massachusetts had lent her aid to the annihilation of the tribe, but the Connecticut towns had begun the 154 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH deadly work unaided. Until then Massachusetts had maintained a formal oversight, an unbroken assump tion of authority among them; but now (1637), being clearly outside the Massachusetts grant, they took leave to hold a General Court of their own and assume independent powers. They had, indeed, no grant themselves, either of land or of authority, from the crown ; but there were no King's officers there in the quiet wilderness, and they would not, for the present at any rate, be molested. For two years (1637-1639) they acted without even formal agreement among them selves regarding the method or organization of their government, choosing and obeying their magistrates, electing and holding their assemblies, according to their habit before they came. But in 1639 they adopted a formal constitution, which they called their "Fun damental Orders/' Mr. Hooker's liberal temper showed itself very plainly in the principles by which they re solved to be governed. "The foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people," he had said, preaching to them from Deuteronomy, i. 13 ("Take you wise men, and understanding, and known among your tribes, and I will make them rulers over you") ; and it is best that it should be so, for "by a free choice the hearts of the people will be more ready to yield" obedience. This was the principle of the Fundamental Orders. Their governor was always to be a member of some approved congregation; but any man might be a free man and voter and fill any other magistracy whose town admitted him to be a resident, without test of doctrine or church membership; and the freemen were to elect the deputies by whom the laws of the colony wrere to be made in General Court. 155 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE The churches at the Bay had found very promptly that they could ill spare Mr. Hooker from their counsels. They had sent for him, indeed, at a very critical juncture ST. BOTOLPH'S CHURCH, BOSTON, LINCOLNSHIRE, ENGLAND in 1637 : when the ministers needed all the support they could get against a single masterful woman in Boston. Mrs. Anne Hutchinson had come to the colony in 1634, to be near Mr. Cotton once more, whom she had been 156 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH used to hear and love in old Boston, in Lincolnshire, where, until Laud drove him from the kingdom, he had been minister of stately St. Botolph's. At first she had seemed only a very energetic and helpful woman, SIR HENRY VANE with an engaging earnestness and eloquence which gave her a noticeable pre-eminence among her sex in the little town ; but before two years were out she had set the whole colony agog. She undertook to 157 ANNE HUTCHINSON PREACHING IN HER HOUSE IN BOSTON THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH preach in her own house, and before her da}^ of exile came both men and women were crowding in to hear her. Great and small alike felt the woman's singular charm and power. The whole colony knew before long how many persons of parts and wit had become her partisans, — how many magistrates, gentlemen, scholars, soldiers. Even grave Mr. Winthrop, though he heartily disliked her doctrine, shielded her from criticism. Young Mr. Harry Vane, the most distin guished and engaging youth that had yet come to the colony, whom all had loved from the moment of his landing, and whom the freemen had chosen governor within six months of his coming, though he was but twenty-four, was openly of her party. But only Boston, after all, was within reach of her power. Elsewhere men knew only her opinions ; and they were rank heresy. She taught mystical errors touching the Holy Ghost which no church of the colony could accept. She even claimed, it was said, direct revelation to herself. The council to which Mr. Hooker was summoned roundly condemned her opinions. It had hardly done so before it began to look as if the woman's partisans would bring not only ineradicable mischief into the churches, but also disorder and contempt of authority into civil affairs. Boston men who were of her party refused to enlist for the Pequot war. That year, accordingly (1637), saw very peremptory action taken. Mrs. Hutch- inson was commanded to quit the colony by the next spring. She turned, in her exile, like other refugees for opinion's sake, to the Narragansett country, whither Roger Williams had shown the way. And then, the Pequots being driven from the forests, and Massachusetts purged of Mrs. Hutchinson's heresies, 159 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE every one began to think again of the new settlements to the westward and southward, on the Connecticut and the Sound. The tide of immigrants from over sea was still pouring in at the Bay, with no show of slackening. More came in 1638 than ever before. Finding the lands by the Bay already full, hundreds pressed on to the farther shores below. Settlements were presently to be found scattered at intervals, long OLD FORT AT SAYBROOK, 1639 and short, all the way from Saybrook at the mouth of the Connecticut to Greenwich, built within twenty miles of the Dutch at New Amsterdam: here a group of villages, there an isolated hamlet, set far apart. The Sound itself was crossed, and new settlements nestled here and there within the bays and harbors of the north ern shore of Long Island. It was plain enough by what long and steady strides the English were approaching the gates of the Hudson. New Amsterdam grew and throve well enough in a slow way; but new colonists 1 60 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH did not come to the Dutch by families, shiploads, con gregations, as they came to the Bay. The Dutch saw very clearly what they were to expect. They had al ready found the English of "so proud a nature that they thought everything belonged to them/' and knew very well how aggressive they would be. Most of the settlements near the river or the Sound, no matter how deeply buried in the forested wilderness, HOOKER'S HOUSE AT HARTFORD connected themselves with the free and simple govern ment set up by Mr. Hooker's people at Hartford; but no community or government owned the region more than another, and some chose to keep an independent authority of their own. In June, 1637, a very notable company had arrived at the Bay under the leadership of the Reverend John Davenport,— people of substance, merchants for the more part, the chief men of a congre gation Mr. Davenport had served in London. They «•— « 161 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLK wished, above all things else, to keep together, make and maintain a separate church and parish foi Mr. Davenport, and live their life in a place of settlement JOHN DAVENPORT of their own. They found what they wanted (1638) within a safe and pleasing harbor on the Sound, which they presently called New Haven. Busy Captain de Vries, putting in at New Haven in June, 1639, found " already three hundred houses and a handsome church " built there. They had been at the pains to erect "fair and stately houses, wherein they at first outdid the rest of the country"; and they soon found their town become a sort of capital for that part of the shore. Almost immediate^ other settlements sprang up close 162 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH at hand, — Milford upon the one hand, Gnilford on the other, and others still as the years went by. Deeming themselves a group apart, though in the midst of towns joined with the river settlements above them, these associated themselves with Mr. Davenport's people to form an independent government, upon another model. No one but a church member, admitted under 'fit !':\ "\ -VV\ (I \ \ HOUSE AT GU1LFORD, 1639 the strictest tests of belief, could among them, it was decreed, either vote or hold office. They tried, in their singular stiffness and candor of faith in an absolute and uncompromising Puritan order, for commonwealth no less than for church, to make the laws of the Old Testament the laws of their own political life and practice also, and steadfastly held themselves to the self-denying liberty they had left the Old World to find. Settlements grew almost as numerously in the Nar- VOL. I.— 13 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ragansett country, though not in just the same way. By 1638 some fifty settlers had drawn about Mr. Will iams at the place of refuge which he had reverently v called "Providence"; and as the other shores of the Sound filled, Narragansett Bay was not overlooked. Colonists crossed the waters of the Bay from Providence, which lay at its head, to the fair island at its seaward end, which the Dutch had named Rhode (Red) Island, because when first they saw it its cliffs showed ruddy in the sun. There Pocasset and Newport were founded. But the settlers on those waters were not like settlers elsewhere. They were people of many creeds and beliefs, — Baptists, dissentient Puritans, partisans of Mrs. Hutchinson, — men and women whose views and practices wrere not tolerated elsewhere. They came hither, as Mr. Williams had come, to escape being governed at all in matters of opinion. Mr. Williams had spoken, in his catholic tolerance, of "the people of God wheresoever scattered about Babel's banks either in Rome or England." It looked for a little as if the shores of Narragansett were to be the banks of Babel. Men of all creeds made free to establish themselves upon them. They set up very simple forms of government, —for they generally agreed in wishing as little govern ment of any kind as possible,— and yet, how slack soever the authority of rulers among them, they did not find it easy to live together. They were often turbulent; always disposed, upon a disagreement, to break away and live elsewhere in small, independent groups, rather than in strictly organized communities. Mrs. Hutchin son herself, who came to Pocasset when forced to leave the Bay in 1638, did not stay long. Her presence bred disquiet even there, and she soon removed again (1642) 164 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH to a place on Long Island, within the territory of the Dutch, only twelve miles from New Amsterdam. Many of the immigrants who crowded the ships that came yearly in at the Bay came expressly to be with old friends and comrades at Plymouth; and not a few others turned thither also when they had had time to make a choice. Until 1632, which was twelve years after its founding, the single village upon the hill at Plymouth had sufficed to hold all who came; but be tween 1632 and 1639 the colony was transformed by mere growth. Seven towns were after that to be count ed within the Plymouth grant; the government of the colony had been readjusted, and a new code of laws drawn up. A newr arid more various life had come to the quiet bay. Captain Standish had been the first to set the example of expansion. In 1632 he had crossed the little harbor which lay before the town and had begun to build at Duxbury. Others followed his lead. Villages sprang up in quick succession, both on the shore to the northward facing the open sea, and on the shore to the southward which lay within the sheltering curve of the great arm of Cape Cod. Settlers turned inland also, and began to build at Taunton, full twenty miles and more away in the forest, upon one of the larger streams which ran southward into the bay of Narra- gansett. The Dutch were not slow to see what they must do against the swarming of the English at their doors. The best and only chance for New Netherland, it was plain, lay in pushing her own enterprises very vigorously and multiplying her own population as fast as possible, and so growing too strong to be despised and encroached upon. The great grants of land and privilege offered 165 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE to patroons had attracted a few rich purchasers, but not many actual settlers. Not many could be found who wished to go to the New World to live under feudal lords more absolute than any in the Old. The com pany changed its policy, therefore. It offered patroons MAP OF NEW AMSTERDAM AND VICINITY, l666 less and actual farmers more. It arranged to let every settler have land "according to his condition and means/' and to give him free passage to the colony ; and it opened the trade of the colony to all upon equal terms. French Huguenots, as well as Dutch farmers, even 1 66 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH Englishmen from New England and Virginia, came to take advantage of the new terms of settlement. It was no small part of the attraction of the place for the English in New England that there was as complete liberty of conscience in New Netherland as at Provi dence with Mr. Williams or on Rhode Island. The colony grew steadily, therefore, arid in a way to coun tenance very sanguine hopes. But every prospect was marred by bad administra tion. The place was spoiled by a veritable pest of governors. The company sent out either mere clerks, or else men of questionable reputation and ruined fort unes, to take charge of its affairs. The weak and sluggish Van Twiller, who blustered and threatened but did not act when the English began to crowd in at the Connecticut, was succeeded in 1638 by the no less foolish Kieft, — a good enough agent for business to be done on a small scale and by rote, but incapable of understanding strong and efficient men or any large question of policy ; and Kieft brought everything to the verge of utter ruin by his faithless and exasperating dealings with the Indians. He prompted attacks upon them for what they had not done; demanded tribute from friendly tribes who were the colony's best defence against those which were hostile; suffered them to be treacherously massacred when they fled to Fort Amster dam for succor against the Iroquois; finally brought friend and foe alike to such a pitch of exasperation that they united for a war of extermination. Every outlying farm was rendered uninhabitable; scores of white men were put to death; the nearer English settlements suf fered with the Dutch, and all the slow work of peaceful growth was- undone. In that fearful year of plunder 167 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE and death (1643) Anne Hutchinson lost her life, her last refuge swept away with the rest. In the South River the very friends of the Dutch played them false. Kieft did not scruple, in 1642, to drive away a body of English settlers there whom the New Haven people had sent down to take the trade of the region; but quite three years before that other rivals had fixed themselves on the western banks of the river of whom it was not so easy to get rid. In 1638 Samuel Blomaert, who had but a little while before taken out the rights of a patroon under the Dutch West India Company, and Peter Minuit, who had once been the SIGNATURE OF SAMUEL BLOMAERT company's governor at New Amsterdam, set up a colony at the South River under a charter from the King of Sweden, Minuit himself leading the settlers thither, and bringing with him more Dutch than Swedes. And there the colony he established remained, safe at its "Fort Christina/' because stronger than the Dutch at their lonely "Fort Nassau/' The new-comers cheer fully lent a hand in driving the New Haven men out; but they kept their own foothold; multiplied faster than the men of New Netherland ; grew steadily Swedish rather than Dutch in blood ; and seemed likely, though neighborly enough for the present, to oust their lagging rivals in good season. The principal general authorities on the history of New England during the seventeenth century are John Gorham Palfrey's His- 168 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH lory of New England (1492-1774) and Compendious History of New England (1497-1765); the second and third volumes of J. A. Doyle's English Colonies in America ; John Fiske's Beginnings of New England ; Justin Winsor's Narrative and Critical History of America, volumes III. and V. ; Bancroft and Hildreth's general histories of the country. The development of the several colonies which were added to Massachusetts in the Puritan group, and some of the special phases of the growth of the little New England commonwealths, may be traced in detail in Benjamin Trumbull's Complete History of Con necticut, from 1630 to 17^4: Samuel Greene Arnold's History of Rhode Island ; George W. Greene's Short History of Rhode Island ; Edward E. At water's History of the Colony of New Haven to its Absorption into Connecticut ; Charles H. Levermore's The Republic of New Haven (one of the Johns Hopkins Studies); Hubbard's History of Massachusetts in the Collections of the Mas sachusetts Historical Society; Peter Oliver's The Puritan Com monwealth : An Historical View of the Puritan Government in Massachusetts ; Charles Francis Adams's Three Episodes of Mas sachusetts History; various monographs in the Johns Hopkins Studies in Historical and Political Science ; and W. B. Weeden's Economic and Social History of New England. The chief original sources are to be found in the Colonial Records of Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Haven; the Provincial and Town Papers of New Hampshire ; the Massachusetts Colony Records; the Collections of the Historical Societies of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Maine; Farmer and Moore's Historical Collections of Neiv Hampshire ; the publications of the Gorges Society ; the Narragansett Club Publications ; Peter Force's Tracts and Other Papers Relating to the Colonies in North America; the Publications of the Prince Society ; John Winthrop's History of Massachusetts, edited by J. Savage, and The Life and Letters of John Winthrop, edited by R. C. Winthrop ; and Thomas Hutchin- son's History of Massachusetts. VI. THE CIVIL WARS AND THE COMMONWEALTH ON the I9th of May, 1643, commissioners representing Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven, sitting in Boston, made a formal agreement that their colonies should be joined in a confederation for mutual support and defence, under the name of The United Colonies of New England. Mr. Hooker and Mr. Haynes had been urging such a union for quite six years, ever since the synod of churches had sat, in 1637, to draw up its list of heresies and unwholesome opinions in re proof of Mrs. Hutchinson and her supporters in Boston ; for the Connecticut towns had no charter of their own, and these prudent gentlemen knew how much they might need the aid and countenance of their neighbor colonies should the time come when their rights were too narrowly questioned, — by the Dutch, for example. New Haven, with her government but just formed, and with as little show of charter rights from the crown as the towns of the Connecticut, was glad to come into the arrangement for very much the same reason. Plymouth and Massachusetts agreed because there was common danger from the Indians all about them and from the French in the north, and because there were awkward boundary disputes to be settled be tween the several colonies, for whose discussion and peaceful decision it would be well to have some common authority like that of a confederation. Massachusetts, 170 STATUE OF SIR HENRY VANE 'A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE by far the greatest and strongest of the colonies, no doubt expected to rule in its counsels. The other colo nies hoped to restrain Massachusetts and hold her back from dominating overmuch. That same year, 1643, Roger Williams went to Eng land to get a charter for the settlements in the Nar- ragansett country. It was hard to deny Mr. Williams anything he seriously set himself to get and went in person to obtain, and young Mr. Vane, who had been governor of Massachusetts in Mrs. Hutchinson's day, and who was Mr. Williams's friend, being now returned into England, was one of the " Commissioners for Planta tions" whom the Parliament m England had recently appointed to govern the colonies; so that by March, 1644, "Rhode Island and Providence Plantations" had their own separate charter rights, and could assert them upon a footing of equalit}^ with Plymouth and Massachusetts. The settlements on the Narragansett waters had been excluded from the confederation formed in Boston because they were thought to be too full of troublesome persons and uneasy politicians to be safe or peaceful partners ; but now that they had their own charter they could endure the exclusion without too much anxiety as to how their rights should fare. The articles of confederation which gave the Puritan colonies their new union spoke of advice and protection expected from the mother country over sea; but they said nothing of England's authority over her colonies. The contracting parties conducted themselves like in dependent states, and asked no one's leave to unite. At another time, perhaps, they would have hesitated ; but now they had an opportunity that might not come again. England was convulsed with civil war. At 172 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH last she was reckoning with Charles, the false king, who for ten years had refused to summon a Parliament, and who had seemed from year to year to become more CHARLES I. and more openly an enemy of the liberties which Eng lishmen most cherished, until the slow fire of indigna tion against him, which had smouldered hotter and hotter the dark years through, burst into flame in Scot- 173 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE land, and men saw a revolution at hand. Even Charles saw then how fierce a tempest had sprung up against him, and yielded so far as to consent to call a Parliament. The Parliament, once called together, assumed a novel tone of mastery. Under the leadership of such men as the steadfast Pym, direct in speech, indomitable in purpose, no revolutionist, but a man whom it was wise for a king who ignored the laws to fear, and Hampden, whom all just men loved because he was so gentle and gracious in his gallant uprightness, the Commons im peached the men who had aided the King's injustice, and proceeded to bring the government -back again under the ancient restraints of freedom. Charles saw that he must either yield all or else openly resist. He chose to resist; set up his royal standard at Nottingham (August, 1642) ; called upon all loyal subjects to rally about it for the defence of their king; and so brought civil war and a revolution upon England. Every one knows what followed : how at first the cause of the Parliament seemed desperate, becaiise Pym died and Hampden was slain, and there was no leader in the field who could withstand Prince Rupert; and then how an increasing number of steadfast partisans of Parliament in Norfolk, Cambridge, Essex, Suffolk, and Hertford formed an association, levied troops, and put Oliver Cromwell beside the Duke of Manchester to command them; how Cromwell's horsemen drove Prince Rupert's men in hopeless, utter rout from Marston Moor on a July day in 1644; and then, in June of the next year, at Naseby, repeated the terrible work, and finished what they had begun, to the utter undoing of the King; and how Charles, on a day in May, 1646, seeing his cause desperate, surrendered himself into the hands 174 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH of the Scots, in order to play the game of politics, — the game of war having failed; knowing that the Scots, who were Presbyterians, would not easily come to terms with Cromwell, whom it would be very hard to bring into any Presbyterian arrangement. Three years went by, and the subtile King lay dead upon the scaffold at Whitehall (January, 1649), showing VIEW OF NEW AMSTERDAM, 1656 a gentle majesty and steadfastness at the last, though he had not known how to keep faith even with himself and his own friends while he lived. He was not brought to his death by the Parliament, but by the army, and the army did not represent the nation. Cromwell had not put his men to any test of opinion; but in the end it had turned out that the rank and file of the army were, for the time at any rate, " In dependents/' holding opinions concerning worship and the government of church and state like those which he held, and the strict 175 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE Puritans who had gone over sea into New England. They were the more likely to hold their opinions stiffly arid without compromise because Parliament, leagued with the leading men of Scotland, was Presbyterian, was jealous of the army's rising power, and wished to disband and send them home without so much as voting their pay. Though Cromwell held them back as long as WATER GATE, FOOT OF WALL STREET, NEW YORK, 1674 he could from violent measures, they at last made bold to win by force in their contest with the Commons, and he found it best to lead- them. All who were not par tisans of the army and of the Independents were driven from the House, and the handful who remained brought the King to his trial and condemnation, and finally to his death at Whitehall, close by the window of his ban queting hall. They were acting for a minority of the nation, but no one dared withstand them. With such matters as these to look upon at home, 176 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH FIRST MEETING-HOUSE, 1634-1638. ROGER WILLIAMS'S CHURCH there was no time in England to watch events in the far colonies across the sea. The New Englanders could form their confederation if they pleased without molestation. But if the war gave them freedom of action, it brought other things in its train which were not so acceptable. No new settlers came any more. Men began to return into England instead, — ministers to give counsel, as well as soldiers and men of affairs to lend their aid in the field of action. Stephen Winthrop, the governor's son, George Fenwick, of Saybrook, Israel Stoughton, captain of the Massachusetts men sent against the Pequots, and not a few others of general note, entered the Parliamentary army. Edward Hop kins, who had but just finished his term as governor A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE of Connecticut, and Edward Winslow, who had been with the Plymouth people from the first, went back into England to assist in the administration of the navy maintained against the King. Mr. Hooker was begged by letters signed by many chief men of the Par liament to come over and lend his counsel in the task of reforming the Church, but would not go because he saw the Presbyterians so strong in Parliament, and did not wish to be in a minority. It looked for a little as if John Winthrop himself might be drawn into the struggle at home. Mr. Hugh Peter, of Salem, who had been a leader among those who drove Roger Will iams forth from the Bay into the wilderness, was among the first despatched to Eng- SIGNATURE OF ROGER WILLIAMS t & land to give counsel in the Puritan cause; and it was he who "preached the funeral sermon to the King, after sentence, out of Esaias": "Thou art cast out of the grave like an abominable branch, ... as a carcass trodden under feet. . . . Because thou hast destroyed thy land and slain thy people." It was a Puritan revolution, and the thoughts and hopes of the Puritans in New Eng land turned eagerly towards the mother country again. It was a very serious thing for the Puritan colonies that their rapid growth was thus stopped of a sudden. It meant that no farmer there could any longer get the high prices for his cattle or for his corn, or for any crop he might raise, which he had learned to count on while immigrants poured in; that the value of land suddenly declined ; that every trade fell off; that money, always exceedingly scarce from the first, now stopped THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH TITLE-PAGE OF ROGER WILLIAMS* S "LANGUAGE OF AMERICA" coming in altogether, for it could come only from Eng land. Some of the colonists lost heart, and hastened to return to England, not to see the wars, but to escape ruin. Some took themselves off to the islands of the West Indies, where, they heard, it was easy to live. Some joined the Dutch at Hudson's River. It required VOL. I. — 14 179 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE not a little steadiness of mind and purpose, not a little painful economy and watchful good management, to get over the shock of such changes and settle down to make the best of the new conditions. Happily the colonists were not men to be dismayed, and had made too good a beginning to fear actual failure. Massachu setts, with her four counties and thirty towns, her four teen hundred freemen, her organized militia, her educated •-' ./• • THE CANAL, BROAD STREET, NEW YORK, 1659 clergy, and her established leadership among the colonies of the north, was ready to stand upon her own feet, with a little practice ; and the other colonies, on the Connecticut and on the Sound, had proved themselves from the first to be fit to live by struggle. Massachusetts had even established a college of her own, and was no longer entirely dependent upon the universities at home to supply her clergymen and her gentlefolk with an ed ucation. The General Court had begun the setting up 1 80 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH of a proper school in 1636, had changed the name of Newtown, where the school was placed, to Cambridge, in order that it might seem to the ear a more suitable home for it, and, two years later, had called the little college Harvard, in honor of the young clergyman who, dying in their midst (1638), had bequeathed to it his library of two hundred and sixty books, and a few hun dred pounds, the half of his modest estate. The dough ty little commonwealth had already learned in no small degree how to be sufficient unto herself. Only Virginia reaped any sort of direct material benefit from the civil wars. Her people were not Puri tans. They \vere drawn from the general body of Englishmen who believed in the sanctity of the Church and of the crown, at the same time that they loved their own liberty and did not mean to be imposed upon by any man's power, whether in church or state. Perhaps they did not know how much they were attached to the established order of things in England until those days of revolution came; for until then the^y had been very easy-going in church discipline, and very tolerant indeed of differences of opinion, acting untrammelled and without too much thought of uniformity, as if in the spirit of the free wilderness about them; for they were men picked out of every rank and class, followed no one opinion, lived in separated houses, and looked every one chiefly to his own business. But when they heard of what was happening over sea in England they knew their own minds very promptly, for they looked upon disloyalty as a thing not to be separated from dishonor. Their assembly, when they learned of the King's death, flatly declared it an act of treason, the more impudent because brought about under the forms of law, and 181 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH resolved that it was the right of Charles, the dead mon arch's son, to be king in Virginia "and all other of his Majesty's dominions and countries." They were led in their hot defiance by their governor, Sir William Berkeley, who had come to them by the King's appoint ment the very year Charles set up his standard at Not tingham (1642). A bluff, outspoken man was Sir William, bringing with him to the rural colony the gallant, thoroughbred airs of the court, and standing square to his opinions and traditions. But the frank and genial humor of his ordinary moods gave place to very hot and stubborn passion when he saw how things went against the King at home, arid it was he who led the Burgesses in their defiant protests against the rev olution. The King's partisans in England, when they found things grow too desperate for them at home, were quick to perceive that Virginia was their natural and safest place of refuge, and her open countries began slowly to fill with exiled Cavaliers. The tide-water counties began to get a new character with this fresh infusion of rich blood, and Virginia grew while New England stood still. But it was not safe for Virginia, for all she was so far away, to defy the Puritan government at home. For, the fighting in England over, and the intrigue that centred about the King ended, the Puritan leaders were masters of the kingdom. Even Sir William Berkeley swallowed his mortification and submitted when an armed frigate came into the river (1652) with commis sioners on board whose orders were to reduce Virginia to obedience to the commonwealth, and who had the promise of all necessary force to sustain them in what 183 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE they did. The real temper of the colony was not as fierce as the tones of the Burgesses' resolutions had been when they condemned those who had killed the King. There was a singular mixture among the Virginians JOHN HAMPDEN y of loyal sentiment and stubborn, matter-of-fact inde pendence in all practical matters. The rank and file of them, though Church of England men in religion, had in them a dash of hard-headed sagacity very like 184 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH the circumspect caution of the Puritans themselves, — a way of seeing the wrong time to fight and the right time to make terms. They saw as well as other men the necessity to bow, at any rate for the present, to a government which had Cromwell at the head of its forces, —and Sir William Berkeley accepted the course of pru dence with the rest. The commissioners, fortunately, were men who knew the colony, and they came with instructions which prescribed in a very generous spirit what they should do. It had been one of the first acts SIGNATURE OF SIR WILLIAM BERKELEY of the Long Parliament to grant again to "the Ad venturers and Planters in Virginia" the old charter rights which James had annulled, and to permit the old Virginia patent to be taken out again under the broad seal of England ; and its commissioners were instructed accordingly. They did not oblige Virginia to receive a governor at the hands of the Parliament ; they simply ousted the King's men, and put the government into the hands of the Burgesses, the people's representatives. Until 1660 Virginia was to rule herself, practically as she pleased, herself a commonwealth, subject to the greater commonwealth over sea. She was very well able to take care of herself. Her neighborly counties held already more than fifteen thousand thrifty English people, — and more, a great many, were being added now that ships were fast coming in full of the fugitive friends of the King, — six- 185 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE teen hundred, once and again, in a single company. Twenty thousand cattle grazed upon the broad pastures which sloped green to jhe margins of the rivers, as well as great flocks of sheep, and, in the deep woods, swine without number. Ships passed constantly in and out at the rivers, — from Boston and New Amsterdam, as well as from London and Bristol, and the home ports of Holland. Though many in the colony ate from rich plate and were wealthy, the well-to-do were not much better off than the humble, after all, for no man needed to be very poor where there was such abundance for all. It was a democratic place enough, and the poor man's small beer went down with as keen a relish as the rich man's wine. The rough, disorderly ways of the early da3Ts of settlement were past, and were beginning to be forgotten now. Virginia had acquired some of the sober dignity and quiet of a settled common wealth. Her clergy had often, at first, been as rough fellows as those not of the cloth, who came to Virginia to have leave to live as they pleased, and had been no help to religion ; but now men of a better sort began to rule in her churches, and to sweeten her life with true piety. She could fare very well upon her own resources, whether in church or state. The Parliament's com missioners had made rules under which any reasonable man could live. Any who pleased might drink the King's health within doors, at their own boards, if they did nothing against authority out-of-doors. Speech was not to be throttled, men's sentiments were not to be too curiously looked into. The exiled royalists who came steadily in, seeking a refuge, need sacrifice nothing but what they had already given up. Their very flight was confession of defeat ; here in Virginia 1 86 of y ^uFogaifcX «> i ^A^^^^^AAAAA^^AA^^AAAA^^ A^ THE ill Y T s* ?«» { 1 Heart of 3^-England 1 I 1 rent at the | 1 I i BLASPHEMIES P 1 OF THE, PRESENT 1 i gE/MEHATIOT^ i 1 Or | , I Abrief Traftate cjncerninjj the Doarine of i» the ' Quakers y DC tjonftrating the deftructtve nature .of to Religion, the Churches, and the State, ?» *1 v.jth canfi deration of the Remedy agviinil it. 6* H Occjtional Satisfaclion to Obje^ioaSj and Confir fc* 1 mation of the contrary Trucdu I i Ry JOHH 7\[ 0 R 7 O N , Teacher of the & i Church of Chrift at 'Boftoru. & jr£0 8>,ff appointed tlnrcttnfo by tke Order of the §» | j GENERAL COURT. {' • J ' p tf / t'Ho\v thf wwk* » ancl thy labour j and patiencfj *^ . • /* i ^-. / ^ . / • . / . . / ..." ' f I »vi4 ho\v won CiWJt not tK^r i»em jpw; tire rvw , ft!ist *id .ire not> and k.tft fraud them lj*tn Rev : 2. 2. i* i 1 1 ' i» i 1 ^ i Prinred by Stmttt! Gretn, at C A M B R I D G r* in New England. 1659. c» «9 ' & $ S* . igtrje^.-jt-y y j" 2?. '.t-jtatai P'S6'? 3? V •s'>^^^'3P^&'3?'JII'Jt"31l'T8t"3':'3!t"- ,/ «'- ' WK. -tvrV. **** /"^"'^ / ) u^»r/- . •-fK fL W$4A* X- '/ " c ' ^ , ", lor the Worshipping ot ( KH! ^,22 .' jvc i -:r; C.:t -inca ;,p:i pjin «-i Den.'*, c- ;.ave been M \ R T Y K 1. D. 3 bavehjdchcii K:c'-,t.hass tut. • v One thcufand forty t'.ur p-.unos vvouh ^f C^»; ; ' Subicnbcd liy $faff-y :-'c* chic;' P.-rf-'cuf- r there ; thinking thereby to ^^ tlitt Blcc-il • i°J '1^' IniKjCvr.r., !»'.*? ;/?>•/; ,:',nrt w: \v iiu!, i ,. • commonly titUDCoiomi*. " ,ut. aawutrt othrrs. In* An Set of clus I p:clciupartiauitnt, Cntuulrb. A- \, "' i __;rptcDfro!iip: Ij^t^ng Abftntcb ,inn B»tt}£$«i^ft tlKmltlbts, anD flit), as tt)c !sair tntrrf}:r tut* tUoi^tu fit, b? ,x-\vi H'.ftHhc JStttt W Couiuii, topuuuih tbc fotur ti all C>;;rDD:na fi-nbieih not boubung of tma Cart ,m^ : • .-. :t Oftirr Ct ! ruiUnd tiUD, ivhcia oi'f OrnstU' CcunnanD t jinfo:sii 4lso:C'"uc p:'.i>r Cctauit cf i c; tl!riV3frt, ant: iliaii'a I, it t|K?fiffttt)rtfi? (1;C|I 'i4.-) :- f • 1 - '•• • '.I,.: FACSIMILE OF THE KING S PROCLAMATION FOR THE ARREST OF WHALLEY AND GOFFE A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE them to demand. But in Massachusetts they were utterly defeated of their purpose. Colonel Nicolls could be very little with them, be cause he was engrossed in the pressing and necessary business of settling the government of the Duke's province of New York; and yet they were not per mitted by their commission to take any official action without him. Sir Robert Carr and Colonel Cartwright were men wholly unfitted to transact business of deli cacy and importance. They had neither tact nor weight of character, nor any knowledge or experience in such affairs as they now tried to handle ; and they were dealing with astute men who knew every point of the contro versy and every mooted question of law like parts of a familiar personal experience. The Massachusetts Gen eral Court had adopted a declaration of their rights by charter the very year they tardily proclaimed Charles II. king (1661), as if anticipating an attack upon their government. In it they had argued their right to a complete self-government, and had declared that they owed no further direct duty to the King than allegiance to his person, the safe-keeping of that part of his ter ritories over which they exercised jurisdiction, the pun ishment of crime, and the protection of the Protestant religion; and they maintained nothing less now in the presence of the commissioners. It proved impossible to bring them to terms. The commissioners more than once put themselves in the wrong by a loss of temper or an unwarranted assumption of authority ; and the whole matter had at last to be referred back, unsettled, to the King, A letter thereupon came out of England com manding Massachusetts to send agents over to deal with the authorities there; but they found a way to 236 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH avoid obedience to the summons, and once again, as when their charter had been attacked thirty years before, the attention of statesmen at home was called off from their business to matters of more pressing consequence. Clarendon, who was the master spirit of the new policy of the government towards the colonies, too stout for prerogative to suit the Parliament, too stiff for right to suit the King, lost his place and wras banished the king dom in 1667, the year after the commissioners returned to England with their report of failure. The Dutch accepted the gage of war thrown down by England's seizure of New Netherland, and the struggle widened until it threatened to become a general European con flict. Without Clarendon, politics dwindled in Eng land to petty intrigue. There was time to take breath again at the Bay. Massachusetts was, it turned out, to keep her jealously guarded charter for nearly twenty years yet. Here the chief authorities and sources are those already referred to under Sections I. to V. of this chapter. VIII. NEW JERSEY AND CAROLINA THE Restoration and the reassertion of royal authority had done much to check the growth of Massachusetts and her neighbor colonies of the Puritan group, but it had noticeably stimulated settlement to the southward, near where Virginia lay with her Cavalier leaders; and even in Xew England a natural growth went slowly on. Clarendon had been statesman enough to see that the colonies in America were no longer petty settle ments, lying outside the general scheme of national policy. He saw that they were now permanent pa'rts of a growing empire, and he had sought until his, fall to bring them under a general plan of administration, which the commissioners of 1664 were to take the first step towards setting up. America was no longer merely a place of refuge for Puritans and royalists, each in their turn, no longer merely a region of adventure for those whose fortunes desperately needed mending. It was henceforth to be a place of established enterprise and of steadfast endeavor pushed forward from genera tion to generation ; and the steady advance of English settlement, showing itself now almost like the move ment of a race, already sufficiently revealed what the future was to bring forth. The capture of New Netherland, though it brought war upon England, seemed to secure peace for America. There was no longer, when Colonel Nicolls was done, 238 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH an alien power between New England arid Virginia. The whole coast was at last indisputably English land, all the way from the little settlements struggling for existence far to the north in the bleak forests which lay beyond the Massachusetts grant to Spain's lonely forts in the far south by the warm bays of Florida. That was a royal principality which the Duke of York had received from the lavish Charles, — all the great triangle of rich lands which spread northward and west ward between the Connecticut and the lower waters and great Bay of the Delaware, Long Island, Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, and all their neighbor islands, great and small, included, — and Colonel Nicolls had established his authority, at any rate at the centre of it, where the Dutch had been, in a way that gave promise of making it abundantly secure. But the Duke was a Stuart, and no statesman; loved authority, but was not provident in the use of it; and parted with much of the gift before it was fairly in his hands. Colonel Nicolls and his fellow commissioners did not take possession of New Amsterdam until August, 1664, and it was then nearly two months since the Duke had given a large SIGNATURE OF GEORGE CARTERET part of New Netherland away to his friends Lord John Berkeley, Baron of Stratton, and Sir George Carteret, of Saltruin. Late in June he had granted to these gentlemen, 239 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE his close associates in friendship and in affairs, his colleagues in the Board of Admiralty, over which he presided, all his own rights and powers within that part of his prospective territory wThich lay to the south of 41° 40' north latitude and between the Delaware River and the sea, touching the Hudson and the harbor of New York at the north, and ending at Cape May in the south. This new province he called New Jersey, in compliment to Sir George Carteret, who had been governor of the island of Jersey when the Parliament was arrayed against the King, and who had held : ; long and gallantly for his royal master. Colonel Nicolls, the Duke's able governor in New York, knew nothing of the grant of New Jersey until the ship Philip actually put into the harbor in July, 1665, bringing a few settlers for the HL\V province and Philip Carteret, a kinsman of Sir George's, to be its g vernor. Colonel Nicolls had but just completed r s careful organization of the Duke's possessions ; had put his best gifts of foresight and wise moderation into the settlement of their affairs, to the satisfaction of the numerous Dutch as well as of the less numerous English established there; and was not a little chagrined to see a good year's work so marred by his improvident master's gift. There was nothing for it, however, but to accept the situation and receive the representative of the new proprietors with as good a grace as possible, li^e a soldier and a gentleman. Know ing nothing of the grant to Berkeley and Carteret, he had already authorized a settlement at Elizabethtown, on the shore that lay nearest to Staten Island to the westward, and had granted rights and titles to other purchasers who had settled on the southern shore of the great outer Bay, near Sandy Hook; and the new 240 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH colonists there now discontentedly doubted what their rights would be. Much the larger part of the population of the original province of New Netherland, however, still remained under the authority of Colonel Nicolls and " the Duke's Laws/' notwithstanding the setting apart of New Jersey to be another government, — in one direction, indeed, more than the Dutch themselves had pretended to govern ; for the Duke's possessions included all of Long Island, the portion which lay beyond Oyster Bay and which had been conceded by the Dutch to the English in 1655, as well as the parts which lay close about the bay at New York. There were probably about seven thou sand souls, all told, in New Netherland when the Eng lish took it, and of these fifteen hundred lived in the little village which was drawn close about the fort at New Amsterdam. The rest were near at hand on Long Island and on Staten Island, or were scattered up and down the lands which lay upon the Hudson on either hand as far as Fort Orange, which Colonel Nicolls re named "Albany/' because James was Duke of York and Albany. The Swedes, also, who had settled on the South River (the Delaware), and whom Stuyvesant had conquered, had built for the most part on the western bank of the river, and were outside the bounds of New Jersey. On the eastern bank, where Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret were to be proprietors, there were but a handful of Dutch and Swedes at most. These, with the little Dutch hamlets which stood near New York on the western bank of the Hudson, at Weehaw- ken, Hoboken, Pavonia, Ahasimus, Constable's Hook, and Bergen, and the new homes of the English families whom Colonel Nicolls had authorized to settle within A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE the grant at Elizabethtown and by the Hook, contained all the subjects the new proprietors could boast. The government which the proprietors instructed Philip Carteret to establish was as liberal and as sensible as that which Colonel Nicolls had set up in New York. On the day on which they appointed their governor they SIGNATURE OF PHILIP CARTERET had signed a document which they called "The Con cessions and Agreements of the Lords Proprietors of New Jersey, to and with all and every of the adventurers and all such as shall settle and plant there/' and which offered not only gifts of land upon most excellent good terms to settlers, but religious toleration also and "a free form of government. "The Duke's Laws/' which Colonel Nicolls had set up for the government of New York, were equally liberal in matters of religion, but not in matters of self-government. The New Jersey lords proprietors directed their governor to associate with himself in the administration of the province a council of his own choosing not only, but also an as sembly of twelve representatives, to be chosen annually by the freemen of the province. This assembly was to make the laws of the colony, and no tax was to be laid without its consent. The governor and his council 242 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH were to appoint only freeholders of the colony to office, —unless the assembly assented to the appointment of others. It did not seem necessa^ to call an assembly at once; the scattered hamlets could separately attend to their own simple affairs well enough until more set tlers should come. The first years of the new govern or's rule were quietly devoted to growth. The governor established himself and the thirty odd settlers and servants who came with him at the new hamlet just begun at Elizabethtown ; and the next year, 1666, the Philip brought other settlers to join them. The governor took pains to make known the liberal terms of settlement he was authorized to offer, in New England and elsewhere in the colonies already established, as well as at home in England. A steady drift of colonists, accordingly, began to set his way. In 1666 the Elizabethtown tract was divided to make room for other settlements at Woodbridge and Piscata- way. The same year numerous families from Milford, Guilford, Branford, and New Haven came and began to make homes for themselves at Newark, on the Passaic, — dissatisfied with the condition of affairs on the Sound since they had been tied to the Hartford government, and determined to have a free home of their own where only church members of their own way of thinking and of worship should have the right to vote or to hold office. It was a very notable migration, made in organized companies, as the first settlements upon the Sound had been, and sapped the New Haven towns of their old stock. "The men, the methods, the laws, the officers, that made New Haven town what it was in 1640, dis appeared from the Connecticut colomT, but came to full life again immediately in New Jersey." Even Mr. 243 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE Davenport left the familiar seat he had himself chosen and returned in his old age to Boston. By April, 1668, New Jerse3T seemed to the governor ready for its first assembly, and he called upon the freemen to make their choice of representatives. The Puritans of the new settlements controlled the assembly when it came together at Elizabethtown the next month (26 May, 1668) and passed a bill of pains and penalties against various sorts of offenders which was drawn in some of its parts directly from the Book of Leviticus, as an earnest of their intentions in matters of government; but they had been in session scarcely four days when they grew impatient to be at home again, and adjourned. When they met a second time, in No vember, the little hamlets on the Delaware, which had not sent delegates to the first session, were represented ; but the people of the "Monmouth grant/' by Sandy Hook, were not. They were angry because Governor Carteret had refused to acknowledge their right to make rules of local government for themselves, under the terms of their grant from Colonel Nicolls, given before the New Jersey grant was known of in New York; and they declared that the persons who had assumed to act for them at the first session of the assembly, in May, had had no real authority to do so. The representatives who did attend the November sitting soon went home again, dissatisfied that the governor's council did not associate itself with them closely enough in the conduct of the assembly's business, and impeded, as they thought, the execution of the provisions of the ''Concessions/' the great document which was their constitution from the proprietors. It was to be many years yet, as it turned out, before the conduct of the government of the colony 244 LOADING SHIPS IN ALBEMARLE SOUND A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE was to be satisfactory provided for. The several scattered settlements had little sympathy with each other, and New Jersey was not yet a complete or or ganized colony. It was a day of newT proprietary grants to gentlemen in favor at court; but the making of grants was very different from the making of governments. At the very time when Governor Carteret wras trying to form a government that would hold the scattered towns of New Jersey together in some sort of discipline and order, the representatives of another proprietary government of the same kind were trying the same experiment with much the same fortune in the south on the "Carolina" grant, which the King had made the year before he gave New Nether land to his brother. In 1663 he had granted the lands which lay south of Virginia between the thirty- first and the thirty-sixth degrees of north latitude to eight proprietors : the great Earl of Clarendon, General George Monk, now Duke of Albemarle, William Lord Craven, Anthony Lord Ashley (soon to be Earl of Shaftes- bury), Sir John Colleton, John Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, to whom the Duke of York was the next year to give New Jersey, and Sir William Berkeley, brother of Lord John and governor of Virginia. Here, as in New Jersey, settlers had long ago entered and begun a life of their own. The Virginians had spoken of the region hitherto as "South Virginia/' and it was some of their own people who had begun its settlement. In 1653 Roger Greene had taken a hundred settlers to the coast of the broad Sound which was afterwards to be called Albemarle,— after the great General Monk's new ducal title, — and had established them on a grant at "Chowan," given to him by the Virginia House of 246 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH Burgesses as a reward for the "hazard and trouble of first discovery/' and as an "encouragement of others for seating those southern parts of Virginia/' Nine years later (1662) George Durant followed with other settlers, Quakers driven out of Maryland and Virginia, whom the Virginian authorities were glad to be rid of and have settled out of sight in the wilderness. They began to build to the eastward of Mr. Greene's people at "Chowan," upon the next peninsula of the same indented coast, in what was called the " Perquimans " SIGNATURES OF CAROLINA PROPRIETORS region. And then, the next year, 1663, the King handed their lands over to be governed by the eight lords pro prietors of "Carolina/' There were by that time quite three hundred families settled there ; and there were none besides in all the vast tract that the King's charter called "Carolina." These first comers had chosen for their settlements a region neither fertile nor wholesome. Great pine barrens stood there upon the coast, interspersed with broad swamps dense with a tangle of cypress and juniper. Inside the coast districts, where the land rose to drier 247 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE levels and the virgin soils lay rich and wholesome, were some of the finest regions of all the continent, fertile and sweet-aired and full of inviting seats; but there was no highway to these. Only the sea and the rivers were open. The land was everywhere covered with untouched forests, pathless and unexplored. For the present settlers were obliged to content themselves with the flat, unwholesome coast, in spite of its killing fevers, because it alone was accessible. This Albemarle country was Virginia's frontier, the refuge of the rest less, the unfortunate, and the discontented, and of all who found her laws* and her power to enforce them irk some and unbearable. Some very stead}^ and substan tial people there were also, no doubt, who chose to live there, — like the good Quakers whom Mr. Durant had brought thither because they could find a welcome no where else. There was a good profit to be made out of timber cut from those splendid forests, and out of the breeding of cattle, which was easy enough; and many industrious families liked the steady trade of the region, with its accompaniment of a free life in the un- governed wilderness. But it was as yet the shiftless, the irresponsible, and the adventurous who were most attracted. What with adventurers who were ungovernable and men of industry and ability who wished to be let alone, it was not an easy or a promising place in which to set up the authority of proprietors who were in England and had done nothing to help the men whom they meant to govern. Sir William Berkeley, nevertheless, being himself one of the proprietors, took the first step towards making good the rights of the new masters in 1664, when, by the authority of his associates, he commis- 248 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH sioned William Drummond to act as governor among the people at Chowan and Perquimans. The appointment of a governor made little difference at first. Not until three years later did the proprietors' attempt the es tablishment of a regular government, and even then the arrangements which they made were very liberal. They SEAL OF THE LORDS PROPRIETORS OF CAROLINA that year, 1667, sent over Samuel Stephens from Eng land to be governor in Drummond's place, and they sent with him a document of "Concessions," very like that which Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, two of their number, had lately granted to the settlers in New Jersey. There was to be perfect freedom in re ligion ; the elected representatives of the people were to make the laws of the settlements; no taxes were to be imposed without their consent; and they could as semble upon their own motion, without waiting for a summons from the governor. The governor wras to have twelve councillors and the people were to have twelve representatives, as in New Jersey; but half of the governor's council were to be chosen by the assembly 249 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE itself, and governor, councillors, and representatives were to sit together as a single body,— so that the people's delegates were sure of a majority in all its deliberations. The assembly used its power to exempt all new-comers from taxes for a year after their coming, and to provide that for five years to come no suits should be heard for debts or any other obligations contracted outside Caro lina. Of course such laws brought insolvent Virginian debtors and all sorts of Virginian outlaws in larger numbers than ever to the settlements, and the Vir ginians called the place "Rogues' Harbor''; but others of a better sort came also, and it was population first of all that the Albemarle law-makers wanted. A more settled life and a less irregular and questionable way of encouraging immigrants came afterwards in due time, — as well as unexpected troubles with the proprietors. The first grant, of 1663, had not in fact included the Albemarle settlements, though those who framed it supposed that it did: but in 1665 a new charter was obtained which advanced the boundary line far enough northward to make sure of including them. And then the proprietors, having a taste for a more elaborate way of governing, adopted a highly complicated and detailed plan, drawn up by Mr. John Locke, who was then, at thirty-seven, secretary to Anthony Lord Ashley, one of the proprietors. The document contained eighty-one articles, was called the "Fundamental Constitutions" of Carolina, and was elaborate enough for a populous kingdom. It bore date 21 July, 1669. v The proprietors were too much men of the world and of affairs to suppose that that simple community, only just now begun, was ready for an elaborate govern ment, which, among other things, proposed to change 250 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH MAI' OF CAROLINA, 1687 very radically the free tenure of the land into a sort of feudal holding under hereditary nobles ; but they meant to establish their system when they could, and were in too ^reat haste, it turned out, to believe that parts of it could at once be made to apply. Even yet " Carolina " had no settlements except those at Albemarle. In 251 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE 1660 a few families from Massachusetts, looking for some betterment of fortune, had established themselves near the mouth of the Cape Fear River, purchasing their lands from the Indians ; but they had left the place disheartened in 1663, the very year the lords proprietors got their first grant from the crown. News of the grant stimulated some of the English who were in the Bar- badoes to attempt the same thing that the Massachusetts men had attempted. In May, 1664, they began a settle ment upon a new site, far up the spreading stream of the Cape Fear. But three years were enough for them also; in 1667 they, too, were gone, and the river country was again empty. It proved no light matter to govern even the little settlements at Albemarle. The publication there of the formidable Fundamental Constitutions in 1673, when the proprietors seemed bent upon putting them at any rate partially into operation, disturbed the as yet unfettered settlers very deeply, — for they loved and meant to have a free life in the wilderness. Though they had been promised freedom of belief and worship, these Constitutions, as published among them, threat ened to make every man pay for the maintenance of the Church of England as an established church. More over, the air was at that very time full of disquieting rumors. News came that the King had given all of Virginia to Lords Arlington and Culpeper,— not to rule, indeed, but to own ; and it was said that the proprietors of Carolina meant to divide the province among them selves, and give the Albemarle country to Sir William Berkeley, whom they would have exceedingly disrelished as their master, being quit, as they had hoped, of Vir ginia's imperious governor. Worst of all, the governor 252 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH whom the proprietors had sent them sided with the King's officers in enforcing the Navigation Acts, whose enforcement would spoil their trade. They sold their timber and their cattle very freely to shrewd skippers out of New England, who brought them what they needed from the ports of the Puritan colonies, got their timber and cattle, disposed of them in the West Indies, and came back again thence with good cargoes of sugar, rum, and molasses, for which they took tobacco, to be sold at home for export into England, — all without license from the crown and in plain defiance of the Acts. The colonists preferred their trade to the laws of Par liament, and their freedom to the laws of the lords pro prietors. Moreover, the very charter under which the proprietors acted had given their lordships the right to make laws and constitutions only "by and with the advice, consent, and approbation of the freemen" of the colony, or their representatives; and these new regulations had never been so approved or ratified. The temper of resistance among the colonists proved more than the agents of the lords proprietors could manage; and for almost ten years after the publica tion of the "Constitutions" the settlers at Albemarle took leave to have their own way upon every critical occasion. In 1675 their governor, Carteret, Stephens's successor, went to England in a sort of despair, to ex plain that he was not allowed to govern. In 1677 the colonists seized the collector of the revenues, and several thousand pounds of the revenue with him, be cause he tried to break up their trade with New Eng land and the West Indies. They were quieter with out a governor than with one, and meant to obey authority only on their own terms. 253 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE The proprietors were to find that it was not much easier to govern settlements of their own planting than to govern the rough-and-ready hamlets at Albemarle, which had been set up without them. By August, 1669, the month after they signed the first draft of their Fundamental Constitutions, they had an expedition ready to go into the southern parts of Carolina and plant a colony which should be worth helping and worth governing; and by April of the next year it was actually planted. There had been many disasters to face by the way. The settlers had been kept a long time at the Barbadoes, to repair their ships and get supplies, and colonists to recruit their number; and they had come away from the islands with Colonel William Sayle, a man stricken in years, for governor, instead of Sir John Yeamans, who knew the coast and was in the full vigor of manhood. The aged soldier who took them to their place of settlement had founded a colony of Presbyterians in the Barbadoes twenty years ago, and still showed not a little of the steadfastness and strength of purpose that had marked him for a leader then ; but he was too old for this new task, and died the next year in the doing of it. The place chosen for the settlement was a pleasing bluff within the fair Kiawah River, - which they presently called the Ashley, in honor of the distinguished nobleman for whom Mr. Locke had written the Fundamental Constitutions. Their settlement they called Charlestown; and there they lived for ten years without notable incident, except that Sir John" Yea- mans, who was their governor from 1671-1674, brought negro slaves with him when he came from the Barbadoes in 1672. Mr. Joseph West was governor most of the time during the first years of settlement, and ruled 254 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH very sensibly, assisted by a council of which the freemen jf the colony elected a part. Things went quietly enough EARL OF SHAFTESBUKY until the proprietors and the government at home be stirred themselves to enforce the Fundamental Con stitutions and the laws of trade. 255 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE It was no mere perverseness of temper or mere love of license that set the colonists so stubbornly against the plans and the authority of their governors. It was rather their practical sense and their knowledge of their own necessities. They knew that, if they were to thrive at all, they must be let live as they could in the wilderness, as the actual and inevitable conditions of their own lives permitted, not cramped by elaborate constitutions or by the rigid restrictions imposed by the Parliament's laws of trade, but with a freedom suit able to their rough and simple ways of living. Vir ginia herself, for all she was so much older, so staid and loyal, was moved to revolt almost as easily as Albe- marle and Charlestown when put upon more grossly than she could bear. She was herself in rebellion at the very time the men at Albemarle were openly defy ing their governor to put into force among them the laws which forbade their trade writh the Indies. Virginians had seen their burdens and their griev ances against the government alike of their governor and of the King grow ominously heavier and heavier ever since the Restoration, which they had once deemed so happy an event, until at last the condition in which they found themselves seemed quite intolerable. Sir William Berkeley was no longer the manly, approach able gentleman he had been in the earlier time of his first governorship,— bluff and wilful, but neither bitter nor brutal. The long days of his enforced retirement, while the Commonwealth stood (1652-1660), had soured his temper and alienated him from the life of the col ony; and he had come out of it to take up the gov ernment again, not a Virginian, like the chief Cavalier gentlemen about him, who now accounted Virginia their 256 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH home and neighborhood, but a harsh and arbitrary servant of the crown and of his own interests, ready to fall into a rage at the slightest contradiction, suave only when he meant to strike. The change was not obvious at first; but it became evident enough ere long. The King recommended mere ST. PETER S CHURCH, KENT COUNTY, VIRGINIA place hunters and adventurers to Sir William for ap pointment in Virginia, wishing to be rid of them, or to pay his personal obligations at Virginia's cost. Sir William put them in office in the colony, and along with them his own friends, kinsmen, and favorites, until councillors, sheriffs, magistrates, surveyors, cus toms clerks, the whole civil service of Virginia, seemed a body of covetous placemen who meant to thrive whether VOL. I. — ig 257 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE justice were done and the laws kept or not. Nor was that the worst of it. It was next to impossible for the small planter, or for any man who did riot thrive ex ceedingly, to pay the growing taxes and the innumer able petty exactions which were demanded of him to pay these men, satisfy the King's collectors, and maintain the expensive government of the colony. The Naviga tion Acts forbade the colonists to send their tobacco anywhere but to England, in English ships, and so the English skippers could demand what freight they pleased and the English merchants could buy the tobacco at such prices as suited them. The same Acts forbade any goods to be brought into the colonies except from England, and so the English merchants could exact what they chose for the supplies they sent and the skip pers could get their return freight charges. There was no coin in Virginia, or next to none ; tobacco itself, her principal crop, served as money, and when it was worth little and the goods it was used to pay for were worth a great deal, it was hard to live at all, and poverty seemed a thing enacted and enforced. Time had been, before the meddlesome Acts of Naviga tion, when the Dutch ships which came in at the river paid five shillings on every anchor of brandy they brought in, and ten shillings on every hogshead of tobacco they took out; and the money had been appropriated to make good the defence of the frontier against the Indians. But no Dutch skippers came in since the Acts, and that charge also fell upon the poor planters. "It hath so impoverished them," declared Mr. Bland, of London (1677), looking for the sake of untrammelled trade into these matters, " that they scarce can recover wherewith to cover their nakedness." Taxes were not levied upon 258 |B R I E F HISTORY OF T II E VV A R R With the I5\(JDI JAfJS in NEW-ENGLAND, (From .7^24, 1675. when the iiift Fnglill^m.inw.-.s mur dered by the Indians, to /l^.Ji 12. 1676. when •/>/•/;;?, ali.ii Jl/it>;catn(t, the principal Author and Beginner of the.Warr, was llain.) Wherein ihe Ground, Bcg'nning, and Pi io^rcfs of the \V;,n , ' is iummarily cxprcilcdT TOGHTHER WITH A > E R I O U S HORTATION to the Inhabitants of that Land, ! By INCREASE M A T HER, Teacher of a Church of thrift, in Btfton in AY\v-£>;?/.- - •ex; •K ESTAMENT O F O U R CORD AND SAVIOUR JESUS CHRIST. TnnHited into the INDIAN LANGUAGE •o-.: •OC •OC AND* Ordered to be Printed bv the C»ntmfficxfrj cf t *$ Vnited Cohniti in N EW-ENGLAND> At tlic Charge, and with the Confcntof tbc CORPORATION IN ENGLAND For tifTrajMgxtc* cf the Gsfyel a*ncn?ft the Indians in AV nr- ~ w *^~ IS »^^»~" IS so* Printed by S.MeeK2T\^ .!/.v/w*u«r- lhaltbfntncfs of the ,7/V ; the Fertility o£ .> wu^*. TITLE-PAGE OF " A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE PROVINCE OF CAROLINA " A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE prietors, — no governor finding his seat very easy or being able to please both his masters in England and the colonists in Carolina. New proprietors brought no new wisdom, new governors no new capacity, to the un changing task, and the settlements took their growth after a way of their own. The Albemarle settlers, whose region presently came to be called " North " Carolina, were, on the whole, the more indulged. They endured many things, it is true, of many governors, — even to open robbery at the hands of one Seth Sothel, who bought the Earl of Clarendon's interest in the colony and came among them to rule as proprietor and get what he could out of his purchase on the spot. But they drove him from the colony in 1689, after having put up with his intolerable insolence and greed for five years together with more than their ordinary patience. They made their temper pretty clearly understood at last, and were suffered to go their own way in most things, with only enough interference and enough demands for quit-rents to keep them un comfortably in mind of the proprietors. The settlements about the broad Sound slowly filled, and were not a little steadied in their ways of life by a constant increase in the number of Quakers among them. French Prot estants came also, and made settlements of their own a little farther to the southward, in Pamlico and on the Neuse and Trent. Swiss and Germans founded a little hamlet at New Berne. The rich heart of the fertile country within was still untouched. There were barely five thousand people there in the year 1700, after forty years of growth. The proprietors had little to show ' thereabout for their ambitious efforts at colony building. But the colonists themselves took heart to believe their 292 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH lot established, and no one could doubt that here were at least communities about whose maintenance there need be no concern. They were there to stay, and to grow, though it were never so slowly. There was more to be seen at the other far-away settle ments in "South" Carolina, — a town, at any rate, and a safe port of entry, such as there was not anywhere upon the northern sounds. Charleston had been removed in ORIGINAL BROAD SEAL OF SOUTH CAROLINA 1680 from its first site to a fine point of land which lay opposite, where the Ashley and Cooper rivers joined to make a spacious harbor before passing to the sea. The removal had proved a mere stage in its growth, — a proof of its vitality. Englishmen, Irishmen, Scotsmen. French men, Germans sought the new colony out and made their several contributions to its founding. But the proprietors reaped little benefit. The English and Scottish colonists were not easy men to deal with when governors put the interests of the proprietors before the interests of the colony, or insisted, as they were bidden to insist, upon the enforcement of the impossible Fun- 293 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE daniental Constitutions. Moreover, there were troubles peculiar to the place. The Spanish were close at hand at St. Augustine, watching their chance to attack and destroy the settlement. . The colonists invited danger of still another kind by seizing Indians for slaves, and so exasperating the redskins. The English-speaking colonists did not wish to admit the Frenchmen who came among them to the full privileges upon which they insisted for themselves; but they were very keen for their own rights, and understood very well to wrhat they \vere entitled under the charter to the proprietors. Governors lived no more comfortably among them than among the people of North Carolina. There were twenty- five hundred settlers in the colony by the time the new Charleston at the confluence of the rivers was six years old (1686), and seven thousand by the time the century was out (1700); but the more numerous they grewT, the more steadfastly did they insist upon having no govern ment they did not like. Proprietary government was proving quite as difficult, meanwhile, in New Jersey ; but the monotony of failure had been broken there by the sudden re-entry of the Dutch upon the scene. England and France had joined in war against Holland in 1672, and a hostile Dutch fleet presently found its way to the coasts of America. It first preyed upon the commerce of Virginia and Mary land in the south, and then, standing to the northward, entered the familiar harbor at New York, and took pos session as easily as Colonel Nicolls had taken pos session nine years before. From August, 1673, to November, 1674, the Dutch were masters in their old seats; there was no New York, no New Jersey; all alike was New Netherland once more. But it was a mere 294 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH episode, a mere passing reminder of the old days when the Dutch were really masters there. In 1674 the war ended, and England regained her provinces by the treaty of peace (Treaty of Westminster, February 9, 1674). SIR EDMUND ANDROS The withdrawal of the Dutch, however, did not put the affairs of the English back at the point at which they had been broken off by the conquest. There were new difficulties to face. Philip Carteret again became 295 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE governor in New Jersey, for Sir George Carteret, the proprietor; and for a little his task seemed easier than it had been before the Dutch came. The chief English towns of the province had stubbornly resisted his au thority until the very eve of tho coming of the Dutch men-of-war, though he had been steadfast and had not ceased to rule in such matters as he could, or to press the interests and the powers of the proprietor. At last documents had come out of England which conclusive ly put an end to the claim of the uneasy colonists that, they had a right to act independently of the proprietor; but they had hardly reached Carteret before the Dutch fleet came in. When the Dutch were gone again the once discontented towns received their English govern or back with a sort of satisfaction, having been glad dened to see the alien masters go. But there were new difficulties, because Edmund Andros, that stirring major of dragoons, was governor of New York. King Charles made a new grant of New York to his broth er the Duke of York in 1674, to cure any doubt the Dutch occupation might be thought to have put upon his title; and the Duke promptly granted East New Jersey over again to Sir George Carteret; but the new grant was not couched in the terms of the old, left a doubt upon the mind of a careful reader whether it meant to renew Sir George's sovereignty or only Sir George's ownership as overlord,— and his Grace had explicitly commissioned Andros to be his deputy in the government of New York "and its dependencies." An dros understood Carteret's new charter literally, as it read, and acted as if he had been bidden annul the right of Sir George's governor to govern. He saw to it that the New Jersey towns should get as little comfort 296 '/>// //^k* &ifv&r?tj~£ ''if r ' A ,- f / r -T ,«-< • DOCUMENT BEARING AUTOGRAPH OF SIR EDMUND ANDROS A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE out of the resumption of their separate government as possible. He was a bluff soldier, bred in the school of Prince Rupert, as honest as he was direct and deter mined, — not. a man to originate a policy of his own, but sure to do what he understood he was commanded to do very absolutely, without tact or scruple or hesita tion, with the rough energy of a man who was no poli tician, but only a soldier. Moreover, he had in him the warm blood of thirty-four. At first he contented himself with collecting customs duties at the New Jer sey ports as wrell as at New York for the Duke's rev enues ; but when Sir George Carteret died, in January, 1680, he went further. He challenged Philip Carter et's authority outright, accused him of acting without legal warrant within the Duke of York's patent, " to the great disturbance of his Majesty's subjects," and, when he would not yield, seized him, deposed him from his govern ment by force, and himself assumed the authority of governor in the New Jersey towns. The next year, 1681, saw Carteret upheld and reinstated and Andros rebuked by official letters out of England, and the dis credited soldier went home to give his account of the affair. East Jersey was to have quiet again for a little under new proprietors. The King's new grants made of New Jersey, not a sin gle province, as before, but two distinct provinces, East Jersey and West Jersey. Lord Berkeley, Sir George Carteret's associate in the original grant, had sold his interest in the province early in 1673, before the Dutch came, and when the Dutch were gone again Sir George Carteret's grant was renewed, not for the whole of New Jersey, but only for "East" Jersey. "West" Jersey passed into the hands of those who had bought out Lord 298 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH Berkeley's interest in the original gift. It included all the southwestern portion of the province, below a line drawn Irom Little Egg Harbor at the sea sharply north and northwest to the northernmost branch of the Delaware in latitude 40° 41'. Its lands lay upon the great river from end to end, almost, of the original grant. All the spreading waters of the stream below and of the great Bay through which it opened to the sea were its highway and frontier. East Jersey passed, after Sir George Carteret's death, to a numerous company of proprietors, by purchase (1681), — men of all "religions, professions, and charac ters/' Some were high prerogative men, likely to be of any king's party ; some were dissenters, some papists, some Quakers. The governors wrhom they sent out were not likely to push any one interest or opinion or scheme of authority, and their province fell upon quieter days, when governors and colonists could generally agree and live in peace together. West Jersey seemed sometimes, to outsiders, a place with no government at all. It, too, had numerous proprietors, whose shares were constantly changing hands, to the confusion both of questions of owner ship and questions of government. But there was, in fact, a quiet growth of prosperous settlements, never theless. The several hamlets planted within the little province were established by people abundantly able to take care of themselves, and local government went peacefully on, whether there was any definite guiding authority fixed for the colony as a whole or not. More over, there was in due time, when affairs had settled and taken on a normal face, a very well ordered govern ment for the province, under a popular assembly to 299 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE which the proprietors accorded powers very freely, and which they let their governors heed and obey in a way that other colonies might very well have envied. Both provinces prospered. Many settlers preferred the Jerseys to New York. There was less taxation there, and less interference with merchants' dealings. The currency was kept freer from sudden changes of value than elsewhere, because the law did not play with its value. In West Jersey- the laws for the punishment and suppression of crime were singularly humane and just. A wilderness lay between the towns near New York and on the Monmouth grant and the towns upon the Delaware; only an Indian trail here and there, like that which ran from the Puritan settlement at Newark south and southwest to the river, threaded the un touched forests; and it was not easy to pass from the one region to the other except by sea. But settlers poured in very steadily to the parts that were open, from New England and Long Island especially, as well as from over sea. Saw mills and iron mills were set up; tar, pitch, and turpentine were shipped in pay ing quantities from the pine forests; whales, caiight upon the very coasts, yielded rich supplies of oil and whalebone; and the Jerseys made ready to be as for ward as any other colony in growth and self-support. The democratic government of West Jersey, the hu mane clemency of its laws, the full freedom of relig ious belief allowed to all comers, and all the features of liberality and tolerance which drew settlers to the Delaware were due in no small degree to the presence of influential Quakers among its proprietors. Among the rest was William Penn, a man at whose hands schemes of proprietorship in America were to receive a 300 WILLIAM PENN THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH new dignity, and a touch almost of romance. He was but thirty-one when he bought a share in the province of West Jersey (1675). He had been born in 1644, the year before Mr. Ingle turned reformer and roving governor in Maryland, — two years after Sir William Berkeley came out to be governor in Virginia. That was WILLIAM PENN'S FIRST RESIDENCE IN AMERICA (LETITIA COTTAGE) also the year in which Mr. George Fox, the founder of the sect of Quakers, first began, a lad of twenty, to preach a new way of life. He preached no new creed, but only simplicity and puritjr of life, the direct gift of a guiding light from Heaven, without intermediation of priest or church or learned dogma, the independence of every man's conscience, and his freedom from the authority of man or government in such things as concerned the 301 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE life of the spirit. He spoke such words as made men's hearts burn within them, and quickly kindled a fire which no man could put out or check. William Penn had become his follower at twenty-four, taken captive al most upon a first hearing by the new and generous way of thought which so gently bade men better their lives. Penn was singularly unlike the plain, unlettered people who had been the first to hear Mr. Fox with glad- A SEAL AND SIGNATURES OF THE PENNSYLVANIA FRAME OF GOVERNMENT ness and live as he counselled. He was son to Sir William Penn, whom all the world knew as admiral in the royal navy, a great career behind him, a favorite with the King for the service he had done him when he was restored,— half man of the world, half bluff sailor; a man of fortune, and of a direct and ready fashion of making his own way; no lover of new-fangled notions or young men's whims ; and his son had so handsome a person, so gallant a manner, so manifest a charm in what he said and did, that Sir William's head was filled 302 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH with dreams of what he should become, — dreams of pre ferment and a notable career in affairs. It astounded and angered him mightily that the boy should turn Quaker and give up everything for a set of foolish notions. But it half pleased the old man, after all, when his first choler was passed, to see how steadfast his son was. It half amused him to rec ognize his own wilfulness turned to such a use. Presently he forgave the strange lad, like the frank sailor he was, and helped him to succeed in an other way. And so it turned out that West Jersey THE PENN ARMS was bought, — so far as Mr. Penn and those who thought with him among the new proprietors were concerned, — to be a refuge and place of peace for the Quakers. It was the Quakers who principally crowded into the new province and gave it its prosperity and its sober way in affairs. But Mr. Penn's plans widened as his thought became engaged in this great matter. A mere share in the ownership of West Jersey did not satis fy him. He determined to have a province of his own, a Quaker colony upon a great scale. The outcome of that purpose was the founding of Pennsylvania, whose peace ful story of orderly government and quick prosperity reads like the incidents, almost, of an idyl amidst the con fused annals of colonial affairs in that day of change. Sir William Penn had died in 1670, and had left to his son, among other items of an ample fortune, a claim for sixteen thousand pounds against the crown. The young Quaker asked for a grant of land in America in satisfaction of the claim, and the King readily enough 303 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE consented, glad to please an old friend's son and be quit of an obligation so easily. Penn asked for and obtained the land "lying north of Maryland, on the east bounded with Delaware River, on the west limited as Marjdand is, and northward to extend as far as plantable " into the unclaimed Indian coun try ; and the King pleased his own fancy by calling the grant "Pennsylvania," in honor of the old admiral whose claim against the crown he was thus paying off. The grant was dated March 4, 1681. There was a charming frankness and nobility about the spirit in which the young proprietor set out upon his great enterprise. He admitted "that government was a business he had never undertaken/' but he promptly assured those who were already settled in his province that they should be "at the mercy of no governor who comes to make his fortune great. You shall be governed by laws of your owrn making/' he said, "and live a free and, if you will, a sober and industrious people/' "For the matter of liberty and privilege/' he declared, "I pro pose that which is extraordinary, and to leave myself and successors no power of doing mischief, — that the will of one may not hinder the good of a whole country/' His wish was to honor God and the principles of the despised sect in whose service he had embarked his faith and his fortune. " The nations want a precedent," he said; and it was his hope to give it them as boldly 304 SEAL OF MASSACHUSETTS PROVINCE THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH and wisely as possible. It was his belief, as it was the belief of the great Edmund Burke a hundred years afterwards, " that any government is free to the people under it (whatever be the frame) where the laws nile and the people are a party to those laws/' He meant that his colonists should have such freedom as his gift, and at the very beginning of their govern ment. There were, when he set up his gentle rule, scarcely five hundred white men, all told, settled within the ter- cc MASSACHUSETTS COINAGE ritory Charles had given him : a few tiny Swedish ham lets, a few Quaker families who had crossed the river from West Jersey, stragglers here and there, looking for good lands. There was something of a village at Upland (whose name Mr. Penn was presently to change to Chester), on the river, where the authority of the new proprietor was first proclaimed and his liberal plan of government made known in September, 1681; but the real creation of the colony was to follow, when colonists began to pour in under the new arrangement. In Au gust, 1682, Mr. Penn added to his first grant from the 305 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE King the lands lying about New Castle and below, by purchase from the Duke of York, to whom they had passed with the rest of New Nether land when the Dutch were ousted ; and a few hundred more were thereby added to the number of his colonists, Dutch as well as Swedes, and a few score scattered groups of lonely settlers. Mary land hotly protested the new grant. Her own charter gave her the Delaware for eastern boundary. She had never acknowledged the title of the Dutch there, and thought the title of his Grace of York no better. But her protests were not heeded. Mr. Penn was determined not to be shut within the continent, but to get his own outlet to the sea, and took what the wilful Stuart granted him. The very month of that new grant, August, 1682, he himself took ship for his province, with a goodl}' company of Quakers, to begin the real planting of the new region. He reached the colony in October; and during that autumn and the winter wrhich followed (1682-1683) no fewer than twenty -three ships came into the Delaware bringing immigrants; to be followed presently by other ships seeking trade. Within but a little more than a single year of his com ing, Mr. Penn could boast, "I have led the greatest colony into America that ever any man did upon a pri vate credit, and the most prosperous beginnings that ever were in it are to be found among us/' By 1685 there were more than seven thousand settlers there. Englishmen predominated among them, but almost one- half the number were of other nationalities,— French, Dutch, Swedes, Germans, Finns, Scots-Irishmen, who ever would come, men of all creeds and kinds, who had sought out the free place and had been accorded an un grudging welcome. A company of Welsh Quakers 306 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH arrived before the proprietor himself (August, 1682), and settled upon a tract apart, which it had been agreed beforehand they should have. The next year came a little colony of Germans to obtain like privileges upon a grant of their own, and to make ready for others of their race, a great many, who were to follow. And so com pany followed company, now of one nationality and again of another, bringing what creed and what peace- PROVINCE HOUSE, RESIDENCE OF THE ROYAL GOVERNORS OF MASSACHUSETTS ful practices of self-government they pleased, to be re ceived and given grants of land without question. Quak ers for a while predominated, as Mr. Penn had wished. The German settlers were most of them Mennonites, whose creed and way of simple living were very like those Mr. Fox had preached. And where there were Quakers government was apt to be a very simple matter. Few officers were needed in their hamlets, and for a while no courts at all. They settled their common affairs not only, but the private quarrels, differences, and difficul- 307 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ties of their members also, very quietly in their own stated meetings, and seemed to know the secret of en forcing good temper as well as orderly conduct in a way very honorable to their principles. The chief town of the province was established at the confluence of the two fine rivers Delaware and Schuyl- kill, and Mr. Penn named it Philadelphia, wishing it to be a place of peace and good-will. At first those who were to build there lived in caves cut out of the bltiffs which lined the river ; but they were quick at substitut- ^ t&*«*J^$»&£S&*'™*40* FACSIMILE OF A SHERIFFS RETURN EXECUTION OF A WITCH ing good houses. By the end of the year 1683 there were no fewer than one hundred and fifty dwellings built, — frail arid cheap enough, no doubt, but sufficient until stone and brick could be had, and time in which to build with them. The change came very soon. The sober, substantial, 3^eomanlike folk who came into the colony preferred, whenever it was possible, to build of good, lasting stuff, and to build solidly and well. Be fore Mr. Penn sailed for home, in 1684, there were al ready three hundred and fifty houses erected, some of them several stories high, built with cellars and deco rated with balconies. Outside the central town, with 308 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE its busy two thousand colonists, there were quite fifty hamlets in the thriving province. Government did not go quite so easily after Mr. Penn returned to England. He left men behind who wished to have their own way, and whom no authority less than his own could restrain. "For the love of God, me, and the poor country/' he wrote them, "be not so government! sh, so uneasy and open in your dissatis faction." But, though the growth and prosper^ of the colony were a little retarded by the bickerings of those left in control, there was, after all, less turbulence in the sober colony than Pennsylvania's neighbor settle ments had made shift to put up with and survive. The government was liberal in all things, and very simple in its make-up, — upon the familiar model of deputy governor, council, and assembly. The courts did not attempt the elaborate procedure of the courts at home. There were not lawyers enough in the colony for that, and no one was very anxious to see more of them there. A very simple method of trial sufficed for simple causes, with or without juries as the parties to the suit might agree; and the Quakers at their periodical meetings saw to it that as few of their own people should resort to the courts as possible. That various population was of course too heterogeneous and too spirited not to give its rulers trouble; but it went on to prosper very well, and to make its way in the world in a fashion so or derly that its neighbors might well have looked on in envious wonder. For one thing, it kept peace with the Indians as its neighbors could not. The Quakers everywhere seemed to win the confidence of the redmen upon the instant, as Roger Williams had won it, whose doctrines and 310 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH principles of life were so like their own. They won it by loving justice and keeping faith, and Mr. Penn set them an example which neither they nor any others who heard of it were likely to forget. He scrupulously PAGE OF TUNES FROM THE " BAY PSALM BOOK" purchased the land he occupied of its native owners. He hoped for their speedy civilization, and stipulated in the contracts which he made with those who in turn purchased from him that the Indians should have "the same liberties to improve their grounds and provide for the sustenance of their families as the planters" A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE who were established there. There was something that took hold of men's imaginations in the sober conference he held with the Indians, as if with the leaders of an equal race, at Shackamaxon, June 23, 1683, and in the terms of the free treaty then entered into. Peace betwreen the white men and the red in Pennsylvania rested always upon the firm foundations of mutual confidence which were laid that day. It was a peace whose guarantee was good-will and friendliness. It was a colony of rigorous laws. " Profanity, drunken ness, the drinking of healths, duelling, stage plays, masks, revels, bull-baiting, cock-fighting, cards, dice, and lotteries were all prohibited/' and women might be fined for clamorous scolding, quite as in Puritan New England. But it w^as a more kindly rigor, as the Ind ians perceived. The Newr Englanders had sought to be just with the redmen ; but the Quakers sought to add a gentle kindliness to justice, and their peace was more lasting than that of the English in the north. And yet not even their fine temper and quick spirit of justice could have so steadily held the restless red skins off from mischief had not the fates of the forest made their borders a place of peace. The Indians they dealt with were not the men who had once made that wilderness a place of dread and caution. Six years before Mr. Penn got his charter (1675) the formidable Susquehannocks, once masters there, had turned their faces to the south, beaten and in retreat before the im placable hatred of their kinsmen of the Five Nations at the north, and had gone to harry the borders of Maryland and Virginia and bring Mr. Bacon to his fate. There were now none but humble Delawares to be dealt with in Mr. Penn's province, men who paid their tribute 312 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH right promptly to the masterful Iroquois who had driven the Susquehannocks out, accepted them as masters, and dared not lift a hand against the English, whom the Iroquois received and fought for as friends and allies. The next year after Mr. Perm's meeting with the Indians at Shackamaxon saw an infinitely more im portant treaty concluded with the Indians in the north. This was the treaty made with the great Iroquois con federacy itself at Albany, on the 2d of August, 1684, to secure the frontiers of the English alike against the redmen and against the French. The tribes of that memorable confederacj^ were the most capable and for midable anywhere to be found upon the eastern stretches of the continent. Their power extended from the lakes to the borders of the Carolina grant, — as the Susque hannocks had reason to know. The Dutch in New Netherland had early won their friendship, — the French in Canada their bitter enmity. It was with the fire arms the Dutch had sold them that they had made themselves masters in all the Indian country north and south, and had brought their power to such a pitch that no settlement of the white man was safe without their good-will. The French had long ago sent mis sionaries among them, to speak to them both of the true God and of the sacred authority of his Majesty their king in France, and had used, through these, every argument of interest and every threat of power to brincr them to an alliance ; but the shrewd sachems who were their statesmen had stood out unchanging ly against their advances, and had held fast to the English, seeing very clearly in their calm counsels, as they sat apart, how much greater the power of the 313 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH white men grew in the south than in the north. The English governors of New York were as quick as the Dutch rulers of New Netherland had been to see the priceless value of this protecting friendship of the border, no less than of the great trade in furs of which it made Albany the mart and centre. They saw how it would serve them when it should come to the final rivalry be tween French and English for the possession of the interior of the continent; and they held the French off by a very close alliance with the masters of the forests. Governor Andros, being a soldier and man of affairs, had seen to this critical matter in person, going himself to the stronghold of the Mohawks and establishing a permanent board of Indian commissioners to keep warm the alliance writh the powerful confederacy which the Mohawks represented. He was as efficient in the proper affairs of his own province of New York as he was ar bitrary in pushing for authority beyond its borders in the Jerseys. And Colonel Thomas Dongan, whom the Duke of York selected to sticceed him in the government of the colony, was no less watchful and competent. Had his Grace known as well how to choose servants and counsellors in England, he had fared better, and might have kept his throne when he came to it. Colonel Dongan was a soldier, an Irishman, and a Roman Cath olic, and had served in the armies of France, — no good school for an English governor, — and yet he proved himself a wise ruler in a colony in which the Duke, his master, saw fit to permit liberty of conscience and to observe a ven7 liberal policy in affairs. Colonel Nicolls had established a singular govern ment in New York at the very outset, nineteen years ago. There was nobody in all its organization to repre- 315 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE sent the colonists.. Its officers were appointed; its de crees were absolute. But its decrees were also liberal and just, made in the interest of the colony as well as in the interest of the Duke. Andros had been knighted for his services there, and was Sir Edmund when he went home in 1681 to explain his quarrel with Philip Carteret; and no wonder, for he had done a notable 'jflir> /ifi MEDAL PRESENTED BY JAMES II. TO THE KING OF T HE POTOMACKS thing. He had strictly enforced the laws of trade, ad mitting no vessel to discharge her cargo at the great bay where his government was which had not paid du ties or made clearances as the English statutes com manded ; and, instead of breeding rebellion by what he did, had linked New York to the home ports in Eng land by a direct trade across sea, which every year grew greater, and which steadily tended to make his province the chief home in all America of loyalty and 316 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH cordial feeling for the mother country, a chief port of entry for English ideas and English sympathies. Colonel Dongan did no less for the Duke's authority, but in another way. In his treaty with the Indians, that notable treaty of August, 1684, he did no more than confirm the policy of Sir Edmund and the Dutch. What made the treaty so impressive an event was the presence and co-operation of Lord Howard of Effingham, now governor of Virginia. It was an agreement es tablishing not merely the safety of the borders of New York, but also the claim of the English to a sort of sov ereignty and overlordship over all the great stretches of the continent south and southwest of Lake Ontario. It concerned Virginia no less than it concerned New York ; and the redskins regarded it the more because of the presence of the ruler of the English in far-away Virginia, as well as of the Duke's governor in New York. Colonel Dongan had been instructed to play a very different role in the internal government of his prov ince from that which Andros had played. Despite the very liberal measures adopted and the sound public spirit shown by the Duke's governors hitherto, it was not in English nature to be satisfied for twenty years together without such an assembly to speak and act for the people as every other colon}' had, north and south. Emphatic protests and a strong appeal crossed the sea close upon the heels of Sir Edmund Andros in 1681, — speaking not so much discontent with the Duke's governor as a firm and rooted objection to the form of government, which the colony now seemed entitled to say that it had outgrown; and the Duke thought it wise to yield. Colonel Dongan came, in August, 1683, instructed to appoint a council and call an assembly; 317 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE and by October New York had a government like that of her neighbor colonies. No tax or imposition was to be laid or law made except by act of assembly,— and that looked like privilege enough. The new governor, too, might well be to the mind of all who liked candor and capacity. He had the blithe humor of his race, and was a man to approve and relish as a comrade ; and yet his firm purpose and clear eye in all points of action made him also a man to respect, obey, and follow. And then, when all things seemed settled, of a sudden the whole sky changed, because in February, 1685, Charles II. died, and the Duke reigned in his stead, as James II., — a man whom all the world knew to be a Roman Catholic, and presently discovered to be a tyrant, the more intolerable for his solemn bigotry. The same year Louis XIV., king in France, revoked the great Edict of Nantes, forbade the Protestants their worship in his kingdom, and so drove fifty thousand of the best people of France, — soldiers, men of letters, craftsmen, artificers, — forth from the land they had enriched, to make Holland, England, Brandenburg, and America so much the better off for their skill and thrifty industry. By spring-time Monmouth and Argyle were in the field, and England saw rebellion lift its head again, both in Scotland and in the south. It was an ominous begin ning for the sullen King ; and the colonies were to get their share of the change which his reign brought to Englishmen everywhere. It was a brief reign enough. James ran his course of tyranny with a sort of bitter haste, and had finished the mad business before the fourth year of his rule was ended. The first year (1685) saw the brutal Jeffreys ride his bloody circuit through Somerset and Dorset, ' LETTER OF DONGAN TO WILLIAM PENN VOL. I. — 23 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE to hang, scourge, or behead those who had incurred suspicion of sympathy, were it never so remote or slight, with Monmouth's rising. More than eight hundred persons were sold into slavery over sea; three hundred and fifty said to be rebels were hanged; women were scourged from market-town to market-town, sent to the block, or burned; and all England stood horror- stricken to see the King's revenge and bitter hate. The next year saw him openly bent upon freeing the Romish Church by his own authority from all restraint of law. Statutes he set aside by the use of what he said was the crown's prerogative. He declared all creeds free; but he forbade the ministers of the established Church to preach its Protestant doctrine. Bishops who would not yield to his will he haled before the courts ; arid, lest the ordinary courts should prove disobedient, he set up a special Court of Ecclesiastical Commission, to do what he should bid in the discipline of the Church. He main tained a standing army without the consent or vote of Parliament, and levied taxes without its authorization. He was as subservient to France as to the Church of Rome, and admitted no one to his counsels who would not accept his creed and do his bidding. It was strange the nation held its hand so long ; and yet the end came swiftly enough. By midsummer, 1688, those who were ready to risk their lives and fort unes for England's constitution had urgently prayed William, Prince of Orange, to come into England, put James from his throne, and save their liberties. William was husband to Mary, James's daughter; was a Prot estant, a statesman, and a man of honor. He came with an army at his back. But it was not necessary to conquer England. She knew her straits and was 320 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH ready and glad to receive him. James miserably fled, the Parliament accepted his flight as a voluntary ab dication; and the throne went by act of Parliament to William and Mary. Thus was accomplished what JAMES II. men who loved the ancient liberties of England were afterwards to look back to as "the glorious Revolution of 1688." No king should henceforth pretend to any right to rule without consent of the Parliament, or in despite of the liberties of the nation which had exe- i.-2i 321 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE cuted Charles, ousted James, and re-established the throne in such fashion as suited its sense of justice and its own security. It was the formal setting up, as public law of England, of the bold doctrine of the people's rights which Sir Edwin Sandys had preached from his place in the Commons seventy-six years ago to the deep displeasing of James I. The momentous thing was over and complete by February, 1689; and it was then just four years since Charles II. died. * For the northern colonies in America those four years had meant a memorable change of government, as ill to live under, almost, as the tyranny in England. For a little while after the loss of her charter in 1684 affairs had moved on smoothly and without serious incident in Massachusetts, though half-heartedly enough, it was plain, under a provisional government, waiting to see what the crown would do. The death of King Charles delayed a settlement ; but James, when he came to the throne, very promptly showed what he meant to do. He resolved to put Massachusetts and the colonies lying immediately about her into the hands of a royal governor and an appointed council, without an as sembly or any other arrangement for a participation of the people in the management of their affairs. At first (May, 1686) he named Joseph Dudley "President of the Council for Massachusetts Bay, New Hamp shire, and Maine, and the Narragansett country, or King's Province/' but gave him no authority to alter law or impose taxes. But that was only a temporaiy arrangement. The real change came with the arrival of Sir Edmund Andros, in December, 1686, to be " Gov ernor-General and Vice-Admiral"; and Plymouth was added to his government. 322 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH WILLIAM III. Joseph Dudley had been unwelcome enough. It was a bitter thing for the people of Massachusetts to have this man, whom they deemed a traitor, nothing less, set over them. He was the son of Thomas Dudley, 323 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE the stern Puritan of their day of first exile and settle ment, who had been second to great Winthrop in the founding of the colony. And now Thomas Dudley's son, once their agent in London to defend their charter, had consented to serve the crown in the overthrow of their liberties. But Andros was worse. Dudley was at least timid and time-serving and doubtful of his power; but Sir Edmund came with instructions and with a temper of command which no one could mistake. He meant no rank injustice, indeed, but he was no states man, knew only the rough way of the soldier in carrying out his instructions, and had very definite and unpala table instructions to carry out. He was bidden appoint persons of the best character and estate to his council, and to disturb the existing law of the colonies as little as possible; but he was also commanded to allow no printing press within his jurisdiction; to insist upon a universal toleration in matters of religion, — especially upon the encouragement of the worship of the Church of England; and to execute with vigilance and vigor the laws of trade. He wras given, too, a small number of royal troops for his support, whose red coats were sadly unwelcome in Boston. Worst of all, he was authorized to govern and to lay taxes without an as sembly. This was evidently the sort of government the King meant to set up everywhere in the colonies. He had instructed the officers of the crown almost at the very outset of his reign to secure the annulment of the other colonial charters, and suits had already been prosecuted in the courts against Connecticut and Rhode Island, against the Carolina grants, and even against those he had himself given only the other day in New Jersey. 324 ANEW - VOYAGE CAROLINA, C O N T A I N I N C T H -F. . Ezacl Dsfcripticn"dnd Ntfwal ; OF THAT COUNTRY: Together with the Prcjint State thcreo;:. A I O U R N A L Of a Thoufand Miles, Traveled thro' fcveral Nations of INDIA N S. Giving a particular Account of their Cuftotns, Manners, &c. . By JOHN L A \v s o N, Gent. Survey or- . General of North-Carolina. LONDON:* Printed in the Year 1709. TITLE-PAGE OF LAWSON'S "A NEW VOYAGE TO CAROLINA" A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE The next year after Andres's coming (1687) he turned upon Maryland. New York and Virginia were already practically his own, to deal with as he pleased. The same year Andros went to Boston, Governor Dongan, of New York, was instructed to forbid the popular as semblies granted but three years before. He was com manded, too, as Andros was, "to allow no printing press. " James meant to be master everywhere, and to permit not so much as a word of public comment upon what his servants did; and all America felt the change. Before the first month of his administration was over, Andros, acting upon the King's command, had dissolved the government of Rhode Island, and as sumed control of its affairs. The next year he did the same in Connecticut; and in 1688 New York and the Jerseys were nominally added to his government, Francis Nicholson acting as his deputy there. The chief general authorities for the history of Pennsylvania during the seventeenth century and the first years of the eighteenth are the second volumes of Bancroft and Hildreth ; the second volume of Bryant .and Gay's Popular History of the United States ; John Fiske's Dutch and Quaker Colonies ; F. D. Stone's The Founding of Pennsylvania, in the third volume of Winsor's Narrative and Critical History of America; S. M. Janney's Life of William Penn : C. B. Keen's New Sweden, or the Swedes on the Delaware, in the fourth volume of Winsor ; Thomas F. Gordon's History of Pennsylvania from its Discovery by Europeans to 1776; Samuel Hazard's Annals of Pennsylvania from the Discovery of the Dela ware, 1600-1682; and Robert Proud's History of Pennsylvania from the Original Settlement in 1681 till after the Year 1742. The chief sources are to be found in Samuel Hazard's Penn sylvania Archives ; Minutes of the Provincial Council of Penn sylvania; Colonial Records of Pennsylvania; Duke of Yorke's Book of Laws (1676-1682) and Charter to William Penn and Laws of the Province of Pennsylvania passed between 1682 and 1700, compiled by Staughton George and others; Votes and Proceed- 326 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH ings of the House of Representatives of the Province of Pennsylvania ; Memoirs of the Pennsylvania Historical Society; Ben Perley Poore's The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and other Organic Laws of the United States; The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography ; and Stedman and Hutchin- son's Library of American Literature. X. THE REVOLUTION HAPPILY the new tyranny had no longer life in America than in England. It came promptly enough to its end when the news reached the colonies of James's disgrace and flight and William's coming. The Boston people rose, as if by a common instinct; seized Andros and his officers; seized the fort; seized even the King's frigate lying in the harbor ; and resumed their old govern ment under their old magistrates, to await further tidings from over sea. The other colonies roimd about followed suit. Sir Edmund had got himself well hated. He was an honest, well-meaning man enough, a plain and not very quick-witted soldier who executed his orders quite literally; but he was arbitrary and harsh, and showed sometimes an unwise and ugly temper when he was opposed. And the orders he tried to execute were intolerable to the people of the once free colony he govern ed. He levied taxes by the authority of the crown; he demanded quit-rents of all the land owners of the colony, because the loss of the charter, he was told by the law officers in England, destroyed the right of the colonists to the land they had acquired under it ; he for bade even the ordinar}- town meetings; and he sought to crush opposition by harsh punishments. To these Puritans it was no small part of the trying experience that he encouraged some to set up a society to worship after the manner of the Church of England, and use 328 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH the hated prayer-book; and that in 1688 the Episcopal congregation thus formed built a place of worship, which they called King's Chapel, in Boston. It was a happy day when they got rid of the hateful tyranny; and an assurance of better times when they presently learned that the new government at home approved what they had done, and were willing that they should send Sir Edmund and his fellow prisoners to England for trial. The action of the people was no less prompt and de cisive in New York, James's own province. Francis Nicholson, Andros's deputy in New York and the Jer seys, was as little liked there as Andros himself was in Boston. Both he and the members of his council, because they supported him, were looked upon as tools of a papist king, and New York was Dutch and Protestant. The two regiments of the King's reg ulars Sir Edmund had brought with him upon his second coming out, to be governor of all the northern coast, were Irish Catholics every man, and Nicholson had come out as commander of one of them. To the uneasy suspicions of the critical Protestants of the lit tle seaport, affairs wore the ugly look of having brought them into the power of men who must of necessity prove the enemies of a Protestant king. With news of the revolution in England, moreover, came also news of war with France, the ousted King's Romish friend and ally; and the King's officers fell into an evident panic. While they hesitated what to do, a captain of the men- at-arms they had called together for their defence seized the fort and the government in the name of the Prince of Orange. This was Jacob Leisler. He had come to the colony close upon thirty years before (1660), as a soldier in the employ of the Dutch West India Company; 329 Sfirit of Perfection Tranfmittcd To PENNSILVANIA, And the Pretended {>s*ker found Perfccuting the True IN THE T R Y A L "Peter Bofs, George Keith, Thomas Budd, and William Bradford^ At the Sefllons held at PWa&lpbia the Nineth, Tenth and Twelfth Days of December -, 1692. Giving an Account of the rnoft Arbitrary Procedure of that Court, Printed in the Year EARLY NEW YORK PRINTING BY WILLIAM BRADFORD THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH had thriven in trade and made a place of influence for himself among the colonists; and now stepped forth as their champion against the officers of the papist King whom the Parliament had deposed. It was the news of war that chiefly wrought upon the fears of the town. It was yet spring-time, 1689, and the news that war had actually begun reached New York, a hasty rumor, before the fact. But it spoke truth, nevertheless; and no man could be ignorant what special interest New York had in the matter. Louis of France was in fact planning that very spring how he should make the place his own, to the undoing of the English in America. With the coming of summer his plans were complete. The veteran, indomitable Fron- tenac, master, if any man was, of the strategy of the forest, was to go back to Canada to take a force of one thousand French regulars and six hundred Canadians through the northern wilderness to Albany, thence to sweep down the river and meet the King's fleet, sent timely out of France, at New York; and France was to be mistress at the centre of the continent before an other winter was out, ready to strike a final blow, first at the Iroquois behind her in the forests, and then at the English on the northern coasts. France made no sign as yet; the whole plan kept covert in Paris, a closely guarded secret; no one in America knew what was afoot. But some seemed able to divine. A keen foreboding quickened the faculties of all who thought upon the hazard of fortunes in the struggle that had all but come ; the air seemed full of something, — who could tell what? — and rumors crept through the forests and along the coasts in which men seemed to guess what Louis planned. ^r-t^/ /^y^Xd. O »-^«) /tf- C/IV 4 - ~ "~ — - -^/ *>T_4) » K/^e^T"" a^ri--i) >*C V-r* <> cxvi-XI AN INVENTORY OP GOODS, S.GNED BY PAUI. RICHARD AND JACOB LEISLER THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH Not a few new-comers to the busy settlements which lay about the bay at New York had special reason to fear to see Louis strike. It was but four years since the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Many a Hugue not family had found welcome there and a refuge from death, and knew not what fresh misfortune might over take them should their insensate King take also these free coasts of the New World. Every rumor bred a deeper uneasiness. No ship came in at the Narrows which did not seem for a moment to be come out of France, no group of ships that did not look like a fleet of French frigates. Nothing was so easy as to throw the simpler people of the little town into a state of mind to be glad of any friendly leadership which seemed to make them safe against plotting Catholics, whether out of France or out of England. Leisler was sure of the sympathy of the crowd, and seemed to it to give proof of honesty in all that he did. As a matter of fact, there was no danger. Colonel Dongan had done his work too well in the diplomacy of the forest. He had won the Troquois to an alliance of which they gave, that very summer, instant and timely proof. As if some English statesman had set their work for them, they made King Louis's plans impossible before ever they were put upon the field. Frontenac reached Can ada in October to find that all the northern wilderness had been swept as with a flame by the fierce warriors of the great confederacy. The fur trade of the lakes was cut off; the posts upon the frontiers were taken and plundered; Montreal itself was barely saved from capture and destruction. There could be no expedi tion to Albany after that season's work of rapine and slaughter. 333 The F R AME OF THE GO VE RNM E NT Of the Province of In America. Printed, and Sold by AnJhm SowU at the Crooked-Billct inflollow*y-L*neiK 1691. TITLE-PAGE OF THE PENNSYLVANIA FRAME OF GOVERNMENT THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH But New York did not know how safe it was; and Leisler had his day. It might have been well enough, had he stopped with thrusting Nicholson aside and as suming to play the new King's partisan and governor till the air should clear. But he did not. For a year and a half he maintained himself as governor, in the new King's name, but without his authority. He even resisted commissioned officers of the King, until a gov ernor sent from England came; and then he was hang ed for treason. It was a sad, unjust end. The man had been hot-headed, arbitrary, blind, and wilful, and had done much that the law could not sanction in order to have his own way ; but he had done all, even that which was the deepest folly, in good faith. He had meant to serve the community he ruled, and had planned no treason against the King. There had been not a little of the heat of parties at the bottom of the trouble. The greater land owners, the King's officials, and the rich merchants had wished Nicholson to keep the govern ment until the new King should send some one in his stead. The small tradesmen, the artisans, and the sailors of the town heard that there was war with France, and that a French fleet was coming against the place, and believed that the rich men and the officials among them were no lovers of common men's liberties, or of a Protestant church, either; and Leisler was their leader. His condemnation was a thing resolved upon and hurried to its execution in New York, not commanded from over sea; and in 1695 Parliament itself took off the stain of treason from his name. In Maryland those who were unquiet and did not like the proprietor's government took advantage of the time to overthrow it. There were men enough who 335 GOVERNOR SLOUGHTER SIGNING THE DEATH WARRANT OF LEISLER THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH had watched for such a chance. Though discontent with the proprietor's government had met very sharp frustration and rebuke twelve years ago, when Davis and Pate went to the gallows for the treason of emu lating the example of Mr. Bacon in Virginia, as many wanted a change now as had wanted it then, and this new opportunity seemed made for any who chose to act upon its invitation. The mere fact of being governed like a private estate and mediaeval county pa^tine was very irksome to the more ambitious spirits of the colony ; and the more closely and sedulously the proprietor attended to his government the more irksome did it become. He dealt very harshly with opposition; he openly interfered with elections to the assembly; he disallowed and set aside such legislation as he did not like; he gave the offices of government to men of his own kin or personal following ; and the taxes were not always spent for the public benefit. It was like the government of Virginia with a petty king in residence. And that petty king, every one knew, was of the popish party, whose part the great King at home had played to his own undoing. Men fancied they saw new popish plots in every trivial incident or shifting of affairs. If the panic had touched New York and turned her government upside down, it was little to be wondered at that it touched Maryland also. Richard Talbot, Duke of Tyrconnel, the officer who reduced Ireland " from a place of briskest trade and best paid rents in Christendom to ruin and desolation/' and who had dared hold it for James Stuart, despite the Parliament in London and the authority of the Prince of Orange, was of Lord Baltimore's kin and his very close friend; and Maryland teemed as no other colony did with Ro- 337 • ?J. Vhe burying ground lit The Jeu;y£uriaqoe sutcKd&e., with. a,banJf. ofeartfy on tfje inside 16. £tietj'iAUei/ jo yi^egrvuruiprcperfbrtfje building ofan-E. £fy. 7. 3£e uvrfyon tf?e west side oftfrecicu $J 31. 9*e. (Ity gore la.Tfo norft-U'ift tlpctyoiut 32. J[ paste fn, g'c— ,. „, . >9 '9 Wit Lutheran, C^urvly and minijterj, fu>upg 33. Rowing tS)esea.fLouring about JfeurVfork. MAP OF NEW YORK IN 1695 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH man Catholic partisans. Lord Baltimore was, in fact, no laggard in his loyalty. He promptly despatched in structions out of England commanding the immediate proclamation of King William and Queen Mary to the province; but his messenger died on the way. and Maryland seemed to lag behind the other colonies in her loyalty. Upon which one John Coode, and some others, pretending, perhaps believing, that the propri etor's officers in the colony meant to defy the crown and establish papacy, got together an " Association in Arms for the Defence of the Protestant religion, and for asserting the right of King William and Queen Mary to the Province of Maryland and all the Eng lish dominions/' officers of the militia and the very Speaker of the colonial House acting with them ; seized the government of the colony (1689); convinced the King of their sincerity and good faith in what had been done, though many of the best people in the col ony protested; ruled as their party pleased for two years; and then welcomed a royal governor (1692). They had made Maryland a royal province out of hand. Lord Baltimore was henceforth to receive only his quit-rents and the proceeds of the export duties. It was a Protestant revolution with a vengeance. Taxes were ordered levied for the support of the Church of England. The immigration of Roman Catholics was prohibited and the public celebration of the mass forbidden by law. The seat of government was re moved from St. Mary's, where the Catholic families held sway to whom the colony- had owed its establish ment, and set up at Providence, presently to be known as Annapolis, where the Protestant influence centred. Marvland was transformed. 339 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE Everywhere in the colonies there was doubt for a little while what government to obey, until things should be settled in England, and his Majesty King William should have time to turn his attention to affairs in Amer ica. Nowhere was the doubt more embarrassing than in East and West Jersey, which seemed left without any general government at all. Formal negotiations had been afoot in 1688, the very year of the revolution, for the surrender of the rights of the East Jersey pro prietors to the crown ; repeated transfers of proprietor ship and redivisions of jurisdiction, both by private vSale and public grant, had from the first sadly confused authority in the province ; and when news came of what had happened in England, some doubted whether there were either royal authority or private right for the gov ernment of the growing hamlets of either colony. Af fairs presently settled even there, however, to their normal frame again. For quite fourteen years longer the proprietors kept their right to appoint governors and exercise superintendence there. The settlers in the two provinces, moreover, wrere for the most part hard-headed English and Scottish people, who were not to be disconcerted in the management of their own affairs by trouble in England or the mere lack of a set tled general government. For quite three years (1689- 1692) they waited, without disturbance or excitement or any unusual interruption of their quiet life, under the direction of their town and county officers ; until at last they learned what their government as a province was to be. There were already five organized counties in East Jersey, arid had been these twenty y-ears, since before the second coming of the Dutch (1674) ; and ten thousand people crowded their little towns and the cleared 340 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH spaces of the forest about them. West Jersey, on the other side of the forests, by the Delaware, had grown almost as fast. Both provinces had the means and the men to take care of themselves. It was not very long, after all, before government became a settled and ordered power again under the new King. William of Orange was a businesslike master, a real governor, not likely to do less, likely, rather, to do more, than either James or Charles in the government of the colonies; and the colonies felt the power of his systematic way of rule very soon. The old charters of Connecticut and Rhode Island were presently recognized again and confirmed; but Massachusetts, instead of her old, got a new charter. Plymouth lost her separate rights altogether and was merged with Mas sachusetts; and many things were changed. It must have seemed to the older men in the towns of the Plym outh grant as if the old freedom and dignity of their life had been done away with forever. Plymouth was the oldest of the northern colonies, and had kept through all the long seventy years of her separate life not a little of the fine temper, the sober resolute ness, steadfastness, moderation, and nobility given to her at the first by her pilgrim founders. Surely the King's advisers had forgotten her story when they thus summarily and without compunction handed her government and territory over to Massachusetts, to be, as it were, obliterated and robbed of their iden- iityl But such, it seemed, was their way of bring ing system into the administration of the northern colonies. The new charter was granted in 1691. It not only joined Plymouth to Massachusetts, but Maine also, A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE carrying the northern borders of the province to the very banks of the St. Lawrence. But, though it ex tended her boundaries, it curtailed her liberties, and it was this that the men of the Bay principally noted. SIR WILLIAM I'HIPS Their governor was thenceforth to be appointed by the crown. There were to be courts of admiralty, customs officers, and a post-office service directly dependent upon the ministers in London. There was to be a rep resentative General Court, almost as before, consisting 342 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH of the governor, his council, and a house of deputies, and the governor's council of twenty-eight was to be every year, after the first, elected by the General Court itself, in which the people's representatives predomi nated. Only the General Court could lay taxes and make general laws. But the King's governor was to have the right to veto any law of which he did not approve, and the crown behind him might set the Court's enactments aside, as disallowed, at any. time within three years after they were passed. All the old rules as to who should vote for deputies, too, were changed. The right to vote was no longer to be con fined to members of the Puritan churches; it was to be exercised by every man who had forty pounds' worth of personal property, or a freehold estate in land worth two pounds a year. Judges were to be appointed by the governor and council; all other offi cials of the colony by the governor alone. It was something to have one of their own fellow colonists, a familiar figure among them, at least, for their first governor under the new arrangement, though that did not alter his powers, and he was hardly the man they would themselves have chosen. Sir William Phips was only a rough, pushing, self-made sailor, one of the youngest of the twenty - one sons of an humble gunsmith in a little settlement close by the mouth of the far-away Kennebec. He had been a ship's carpenter, a common seaman, a ship's captain,— al ways sanguine, . always adventurous, always on the make, risking everything to win his way, and as cheer ful and hearty and full of confident plans when he had lost as when he had won. At last he had actually made the fortune he was in quest of, by finding and recover- 343 PHIPS RECOVERING THE SUNKEN TREASURE THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH ing the treasure of a sunken Spanish galleon in the southern seas. He had been much in England, and had won favor in the court and out of it by his bluff and honest energy and unfailing good - will, and his breezy manners, brought fresh from the salt seas. King James had knighted him Sir William for the Spanish treasure he brought into England, and had made him high sheriff of New England when Sir Ed mund Andros was governor there. In the year 1690, the year before the new charter was signed, he had led an expedition into the north and taken Acadia from the French, with much excellent private plun der, and then had failed in an expedition against Quebec. He was no statesman, and it was not pleas ant for any man to be the first governor under the new charter; but bluff Sir William, known to every man in Boston, was better than a stranger might have been. The new King's coming to the throne in England had brought war in its train, a long war with the French, as every one had foreseen it must,— "King AVilliam's War/' they called it in the colonies; and war with the French meant fear and massacre on the northern bor ders, where the French were but too apt at stirring the Indians to their fierce attacks even in times of peace. It was this war Jacob Leisler had heard would surely bring French ships into New York and a Roman Catholic government. It gave Sir William Phips leave to make his expeditions against the north, for adventure and profit, instead. In 1692 a distemper showed itself at Salem, in Massa chusetts, which seemed for a little blacker than war itself, — an ominous distemper of the mind. It was the A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE year of frenzy against what men fancied to be witch craft, and Salem, where the chief madness was, saw nineteen persons swing upon her gallows hill for com merce with the devil. Some really believed them witches ; some schemed to send their personal enemies to the gal lows with a false charge. Governor Phips was induced to appoint special courts for the trial of the witches; and a long year went by before men's better thoughts, WILLIAM PRNN'S RESIDENCE IN 1699 natural pity, and awakened consciences called a halt upon the murderous frenzy, and Salem, with all the province, tried to forget what had been done to the in nocent. In that year, 1692, the King appointed Benjamin Fletcher to be governor of New York, and of Pennsyl vania as well, which he was instructed to bring within his jurisdiction, for the consolidation of government; and Sir Lionel Copley, appointed in 1691, became royal 346 AN INTERVIEW BETWEEN SIR EDMUND ANDROS AND JAMES BLAIR A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE governor of Maryland. Sir Edmund Andros, too, was that 3Tear once more commissioned governor, this time of Virginia, and stayed there full five years, a quieter if not a wiser man than in the days of King James. The Virginians did not wholly dislike him, taking him for what he was, a rough soldier, more efficient than patient, who meant to do his duty according to his in structions, but did not know how to do it in the wise way for his own interests and the general peace. He honestly devoted himself to the welfare of the colony, encouraged the growth of cotton in order that cloth might be made, improved the methods of administration, and sought in more than one way to better the sources of wealth. But the Virginians liked as little as the other colonists did his zeal in the enforcement of the acts of trade; and his arbitrary temper ruined him at last by bringing him into collision with James Blair. Andros's predecessor in the governorship of Virginia had been Francis Nicholson, a man who had been hardly more than a tool of James's tyranny a little while before in New York, but who was at heart something better than a mere placeman. He was intemperate, and in private often showed himself gross and licentious; but he had some of the gifts of a statesman, and in quiet Virginia devoted himself very steadily to the welfare of the people he governed, no less than to the advance ment of the general interests of the crown. James Blair had found in him an intelligent friend, and not an opponent, when he sought to set up a college in the colony. A great deal of Virginian politics centred in Mr. Blair. He was a Scotsman bred to orders in the English Church, and was but thirty-six when Sir Ed mund Andros was made governor of Virginia. He 348 THE SWARMING OF THE ENGLISH had come to the colony in 1685, at twenty-nine; and in 1690, the year Mr. Nicholson became governor, he had been appointed commissary for Virginia by the Bishop of London. Virginia was supposed to lie within the see of London, and as the bishop's commissary there it was Mr. Blair's duty to inspect, report upon, and ad minister discipline in the church of the colony. He THE FIRST CHURCH IN NEWARK, NEW JERSEY made it his first task to establish a college, —the assem bly, the governor, and every true friend of Virginia at his back in the enterprise, — in order that education might sustain order and enlightenment. The King granted a charter and revenues to the college in 1692; the merchants of London subscribed right handsomely ; Governor Nicholson handed over to it three hundred and fifty pounds voted to him by the assembly; and Virginia at last had the college she had wished and 349 A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE planned for ever since the days of Sir George Yeardley. It was agreed that it should be called the College of William and Mary. But when Sir Edmund Andros came, Mr. Nicholson being sent to administer the affairs of Maryland, it was found, after a few years' trial, that he and Mr. Blair could not live in the same colony. Mr. Blair was as 'hot-tempered as Sir Edmund, and spoke his mind in as choleric and unstinted a way. But Mr. Blair, though he was often boisterous, generally managed, after the canny Scots manner, to be right as well, and generally had both the law and the interests of the colony on his side when it came to a contest, while Sir Edmund had a great talent for putting himself in the wrong. When at last it came to a breach between the two, therefore, as it did, Sir Edmund lost and Mr. Blair won. Sir Edmund was recalled to England, and Mr. Nicholson was named governor once more. It was a long time before Mr. Blair ceased to reign in Virginia. Mr. Nichol son became instrumental in removing the capital from Jamestown, which Mr. Bacon had burned, to Williams- burg, more wholesomely placed, ten miles back from the river. The college also had been placed there; and there Mr. Blair continued to preside as governors came and went. For the authorities and sources for this period, See the references under Sections I. to V. and VII. to IX. of this chapter, so far as they cover the later years of the seventeenth century. END OF VOL. I. RETURN TO: CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT 198 Main Stacks LOAN PERIOD 1 Home Use 2 3 4 5 6 ALL BOOKS MAY BE RECALLED AFTER 7 DAYS. Renewals and Recharges may be made 4 days prior to the due date. Books may be renewed by calling 642-3405. DUE AS STAMPED BELOW. NOV 2 9 2000 FORM NO. DD6 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY 50M Berkeley, California 94720-6000 GENERAL LIBRARY -U.C. BERKELEY BODDflSSSll / , //- W/6 THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY